Several pets were seized from an elderly couple in La Louvière, near Mons, after a local animal rights group found that the animals were being kept in “deplorable” living conditions.
The number of animals seized was not made public, but the local branch of animal protection group SPA said that the couple were keeping them in two separate homes.
The animals seized were mainly elderly dogs, which the SPA said were kept “locked inside cages, some of them minuscule,” adding that the animals’ living conditions were “deplorable.”
Veterinarians were found that many of the dogs were infested by fleas and suffered from heart problems and edemas.
The SPA said it suspected that the pair, in their eighties, were animal hoarders, a condition which is known in French as “Noah’s Ark syndrome.”
Animal hoarding is thought to be the result of a mental disorder, rather than deliberate animal cruelty.
The Brussels Times
