Soyi­ni Grey

There is a need for more dog shel­ters in T&T.

Cur­rent­ly there is on­ly ac­com­mo­da­tion for 100 dogs at the Trinidad and To­ba­go So­ci­ety of the Pre­ven­tion of Cru­el­ty to An­i­mals’ (TTSP­CA) fa­cil­i­ties and their di­rec­tor says they do not have the fund­ing to house all the dogs that come to them.

They al­so cau­tion that more peo­ple are be­com­ing breed­ers, but most are do­ing it il­le­gal­ly.

It is one of the is­sues re­vealed Fri­day dur­ing the 15th vir­tu­al meet­ing of the Joint Se­lect Com­mit­tee (JSC) on Fi­nance and Le­gal Af­fairs – an in­quiry in­to the State’s strat­e­gy for im­ple­ment­ing un-pro­claimed leg­is­la­tion passed by Par­lia­ment dur­ing the last 20 years (Part II) with spe­cif­ic fo­cus on–The Dog Con­trol Act.

“One of the big prob­lems re­al­ly over the past 10 years for the cor­po­ra­tions ( re­gion­al cor­po­ra­tions) even if they did get their units run­ning would have been ac­cess to a hold­ing fa­cil­i­ty,” said Si­ta Ku­ruvil­la, Di­rec­tor of the TTSP­CA.

She said be­cause there are in­suf­fi­cient dog shel­ters they have had to ac­cept dogs from Port- of- Spain to as far as Pe­nal, which even they thought was not prac­ti­cal. The as­so­ci­a­tion on­ly has one shel­ter which is on Christo­pher Samuel Dri­ve, in St. James.

Un­der the Dog Con­trol Act, there was a pro­vi­sion for four shel­ters to be built. Of those four on­ly the one is in San Fer­nan­do, which will be man­aged by the re­gion­al cor­po­ra­tion, and it is close to com­ple­tion, pend­ing the con­struc­tion of a perime­ter wall.

On­ly then it will be ready to be­gin hous­ing dogs.

Ku­ruvil­la said, “There re­al­ly is no hold­ing fa­cil­i­ty for these an­i­mals any­way apart from the TTSP­CA. We have ca­pac­i­ty for just over 100 dogs in our fa­cil­i­ty and the San Fer­nan­do fa­cil­i­ty, which is say­ing they have 12 ken­nels.”

While most of the dogs the TTSP­CA hous­es come from the pub­lic, oc­ca­sion­al­ly they are called to shel­ter strays or dogs found over­crowd­ed fa­cil­i­ties and have to be res­cued.

Ku­ruvil­la said re­gion­al au­thor­i­ties need­ed to de­vel­op the ca­pac­i­ty to han­dle this func­tion be­cause her or­gan­i­sa­tion does not have the ca­pac­i­ty.

She al­so flagged the rise of il­le­gal breed­ers post-COVID, say­ing many peo­ple piv­ot­ed to this as a busi­ness.

Many of these dogs are seized and have to be placed in shel­ters be­cause the breed­ers are not fol­low­ing best prac­tices. She al­so warned that the dogs they sell are un­reg­is­tered, their lin­eage can­not be prop­er­ly traced and the in­dus­try is putting pres­sure on their re­sources.

The JSC was chaired by Sen­a­tor Hazel Thomp­son-Ahye.

The Min­istry of Rur­al De­vel­op­ment and Lo­cal Gov­ern­ment, sev­er­al mu­nic­i­pal cor­po­ra­tions, and the NGO An­i­mals 360 Foun­da­tion were asked to ap­pear.