His name is JB, he’s just four weeks old, and he was destined for a bad, very bad end. The kitten was rescued at the last moment: he was about to be shredded in the waste recycling plant, ended up there after someone had thrown him in the trash on the street. Now he is calm and safe, adopted by an employee of the disposal company. JB, the name was given to him by the center of Hartlepool, UK, which covers the full processing cycle, it was hidden in the recycling bin that was about to be fed into the shredding machine. They spotted him on the terminal picking line, after passing through two waste processing centers.
“It was a true miracle – said its new owner – the staff working on the conveyor line discovered the kitten at the last moment, it was about to be swallowed by the press”. Ingrid Brough-Williams, the company’s marketing consultant, said a similar incident had occurred before. “We had discovered some kittens – she explains – contained in a cardboard box closed with duct tape. Before that we found … snakes. It’s really sad to get rid of the animals by throwing them in the trash”.
Instead, it had gone much worse for the cats thrown in the garbage a few months ago in a small town in the lower Salento. Three were found dead, the other two miraculously survived. However, thanks to the filmed footage, the perpetrator of the act was identified, reported and indicted. A few days ago the court of Lecce sentenced him for animal abuse, as “for cruelty and without necessity he caused injuries to five kittens, brutally detaching them from their mother as soon as they were born and subsequently abandoning them inside a rubbish bin, deriving from such carried out the deaths of three of them”, to 9 months’ imprisonment. Not only.
He will also have to provide compensation for the damage in favor of the Enpa (National Animal Protection Body) which had denounced him, appearing as a civil party in the process. The report came from a volunteer from an animal welfare association in Salve (Lecce) who had warned the town’s carabinieri. The latter had acquired images from the surveillance cameras of a shop located nearby. animals”. Carla Rocchi, national president of Enpa, commented as follows: “This ruling highlights how important it is to report crimes against animals and do so promptly. Only in this way is it possible to rescue and save animals and at the same time bring to justice the people who are responsible for these obscenities. We thank the Salve carabinieri who intervened immediately and made it possible to identify and bring the culprit to justice”.
Enpa’s lawyer, Carla Ricci, adds: “Also in this trial a very important fact is confirmed and that is that, in the field of crimes against animals, there are more and more guilty sentences issued thanks to the acquisition of images of surveillance, both public and private. A fundamental tool which, in order to be effective, requires complaints and timely investigations. As the Enpa legal office, we are experiencing an ever greater sensitivity and participation of people in this sense, who report and who in many cases document the facts with Photo and video”.
