The images are beyond disturbing – and no, that’s not a reference to Afghanistan.
In Australia, an allegedly free country, police have clashed with anti-lockdown protesters, including pulling guns on them, applying chokeholds on them, pepper-spraying them and bashing them with batons.
But here may be a new low that not even a de Blasio or a Lightfoot could consider.
The Sydney Morning Herald reported Sunday that a local government council in the state of New South Wales ordered the execution of rescue dogs at a publicly owned kennel in an effort to “protect” its citizens.
“Bourke Shire Council, in the state’s north-west, killed the dogs to prevent volunteers at a Cobar-based animal shelter from travelling to pick up the animals last week,” the Herald reported.
The paper said “several” dogs were killed, but did not provide an exact number. It also noted that they had been shot to death.
A spokesman for a government watchdog agency, the Office of Local Government, or OLG, told the paper that it “has been informed that the council decided to take this course of action to protect its employees and community, including vulnerable Aboriginal populations, from the risk of COVID-19 transmission,”
And here’s the kicker:
According to the state Health Department, the Herald reported, “there have been no recent locally acquired COVID-19 cases in Cobar, although fragments of the virus have been found in the area’s sewerage system.”
Another source told the paper that “shelter volunteers are distressed and had COVID-safe measures in place to handle the dogs, one of which was a new mother.”
And apparently this is not the first time. Minister Shelley Hancock, the head of the OLG, “has previously faced questions in Parliament over the shooting of animals in council pounds.
An animal rights activist, Lisa Ryan, is demanding an urgent investigation.
“We are deeply distressed and completely appalled by this callous dog shooting and we totally reject council’s unacceptable justifications that this killing was apparently undertaken as part of a COVID- safe plan,” Ryan told the Herald.
COVID-19 is creating all kinds of sickness, not all of it physical.
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