A West Highland Terrier named Sniegius went missing last Thursday in Kretinga District, western Lithuania. What the dog's owners found during the search caused a wave of raids by police and volunteers across Lithuania.
While combing the area where Sniegius had last been seen, the people searching for the dog heard a bark inside a shabby-looking house.
“We approached a building and we saw, through a dirty window, our Sniegius locked in a cage!” Veronika Šiaulinskienė, a member of the search party, later shared on Facebook.
In addition to Sniegius, there were 18 more dogs locked in cages, all of them seemingly pure-bred, according to her.
“The view was dreadful. The dogs were scared, kept in terrible anti-sanitary conditions in small cages, with no water or food, [...] lying in puddles of their own urine,” Šiaulinskienė described what she saw.
The searchers confronted the supposed owner of the dogs who said that she had found lost Sniegius and was planning to look for the dog's owners the following day.
However, the party called the police about suspected illegal dog breeding.
By the time the officers arrived, the building was locked. However, the story on social media created an uproar, with people sharing sightings of other suspected illegal animal breeding kennels.
Kretinga District authorities, along with animal welfare volunteers, later raided the house and seized the dogs.
Several similar raids, involving animal welfare officials aided by volunteers, were reported over the weekend in western Lithuania. In all, 47 dogs were taken from suspected illegal breeders, according to the dog shelter Nuaras.
“It's as if the gates of hell opened up,” the shelter's director Jurgita Gustaitienė described the weekend's raids to LRT TV.
“I had no idea of the scale of this problem – [illegal dog breeding] is a very well-organised black business. The conditions are terrible, [the animals are] bred, exploited without observing any regulations,” she said. “It's sadistic.”
In addition to officials, volunteer activists started sharing locations of suspected illegal breeding kennels and raiding them over the weekend.
At one point, the situation got “out of control”, Gustaitienė posted on Facebook on Saturday night.
“There's action in Tauragė District, in three or four places. Without the police present, people are taking dogs from private properties and taking them to shelters or to us,” she wrote, pleading for the people to stop.
“The point is not just to take in all the dogs, the point is to solve the problem,” she added, insisting that law enforcement officers need to record and collect evidence in order to clamp down on illegal breeders.
Giedrius Blekaitis, of the State Food and Veterinary Service, said that while the public's reaction and involvement was welcome, one of the problems was that people were willing to buy puppies from unlicensed breeders.
According to him, regulations in Lithuania were tightened in 2012 and all animal breeders must have a license.
“Illegal breeding and trade is a problem faced by all EU countries. We have some bitter experience in dealing with third countries: Belarus, Russia, Ukraine. There are cases when animals are brought in under non-commercial travel documents and then stay within the EU,” Blekaitis said.
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