Dog Rescue in Tenerife

Tenerife is great for tourists. All that sun, sand, sea and sangria – what’s not to like? And as a place to live, the island offers a friendly, relaxed pace in a pleasant climate. No wonder so many expats flock here to retire or looking for a new life in the sun.

Unfortunately, the island is not always so kind to its four-legged residents. Hunting season here is notoriously hard on the podenco hunting dogs and the treatment of older dogs by some hunters after the season is over is heartless – in cases, even sadistic. Then there are those who may not mean to be cruel, like the short term ‘swallows’ who come and go. Some of them casually leave behind the pets they picked up at the beginning of their stay like old socks that won’t fit in the suitcase.

Maybe they think it does not get so cold here so hey… the pet will survive just fine. Except of course it won’t. An abandoned dog left to its own devices could starve to death, die of thirst, get run over by a car, get sick – or get pregnant and add to the already overwhelming problem.

Then there are the feral cat families which can manage reasonably well as long as there is enough food to sustain them and they have access to water. In some areas, kindly individual Tenerife residents feed the feral cats and sometimes participate in trap, neuter, release programmes. There are also larger groups and registered charities that focus on rescuing, neutering and homing cats and kittens. But no amount of spaying and rehoming ever seems to put as much as a dent in the flood of new kittens born every spring.

But being chucked out like last month’s newspaper is not the only thing Tenerife’s dogs have got to worry. At least twice a year a warning goes out amongst animal lovers here that someone has been laying out poison for the dogs. Sometimes it is nails in sausages, sometimes it is rat poison but this is a recurring event and it happens often enough to suspect there is more than one sick bastard on the island who gets his kicks by killing dogs.

Last but definitely not least, there are the cruelties inflicted on individual dogs. A few years, Tenerife was sickened by the abuse inflicted on Martin, a dog who had been beaten, cut, buried alive and left to die. He was buried up to his neck in dirt, unable even to turn his eyes away from the sun.

In the picture of him above, the red you see is not a blanket.  That is open, raw flesh where his skin was abraded away.

Martin’s long road to recovery was documented in a Facebook page and although Martin, renamed Pinky left for Rainbow Bridge in September 2016, you can still see his story and that of vet Yaiza who brought him back from the brink.