This weekend we discovered our neighbor a few floors below us went away for the weekend, leaving her dog all alone on the balcony for three days and two nights!!! Who leaves a dog on a balcony?! Seriously! The poor thing was whining and crying all weekend long, and who could blame it? The best part is that no one would help – we called the building super, she was in bed and would deal with it tomorrow (“he’s fine out there overnight, no?”) – we called animal control, they only come after hours if there is an emergency (I guess dying of a broken heart and possible dehydration doesn’t count) – we called the police (“what do you want us to do? We can’t enter the unit without a warrant unless it’s an emergency”) NO ONE WOULD HELP THIS POOR CREATURE!!
If there was a kid out there, all alone on the balcony for the weekend, with nothing but a bowl of water, 20 people would be lined up with ladders to rescue him. Alas, a dog’s fate is not so pretty.
“We can judge the heart of a man by his treatment of animals”, wrote philosopher Immanuel Kant. So, you can imagine...
As German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer once noted, "Compassion for animals is intimately connected with goodness of character and it may be confidently asserted that he who is cruel to animals cannot be a good man." Thankfully, my concerns for the abandoned pup were shared with other neighbours in the building who had also been kept up all night by the poor creature’s desperate cries. I wonder, though, that they lacked the wherewithal to call anyone about it…
Next time, I’m just getting a ladder and taking things into my own hands!