It has now been one year since the day Nawall appeared hanging around an area of greenhouses in the Almeria town of Berja. A very skinny abandoned dog, which a local worker could see with its throat half slit because of the chain tied around its neck. After several days of trying to approach him to help him without success, he asked a rescue group from Níjar for help. After establishing a fixed feeding point, and with the help of a cage trap, they managed to rescue him. When they were able to observe him closely, they found that he had a chain embedded in his neck that had been cutting his throat little by little. Understanding the seriousness of his condition, they contacted El Refugio requesting help for him. We took him in immediately and our veterinary team began working to get him through.
Cases like Nawall's are unfortunately frequent. Apparently, many inhabitants of rural areas have warehouses or cabins located on the outskirts of the towns they live in, where they usually store farming tools, fertilizers, livestock feed, vehicles, etc. It is usually customary to buy a dog puppy, or for someone you know to give them a puppy from a litter that their dog has had. Since he was little, they put a chain around his neck and leave him tied inside the shed with the intention of deterring potential thieves. That dog will spend the rest of its life tied and alone in that place, most of the time dark, suffering high temperatures in summer, and stubborn cold and humidity in winter. It is really a “life sentence” in an isolation module. In many cases, the owner stops by from time to time to pour water into a broken drum, and leave him a loaf of stale bread and a pile of raw chicken offal, which the town butchers usually give them when they buy meat for their family. family. For many of these little ones, it is their only food. The little dog grows as the weeks go by, but the chain he wears around his neck does not. Such is the degree of disinterest of the person who had Nawall, that he did not even look at him or touch him to be able to realize that that chain was beginning to strangle him. The diameter of the neck continued to increase until a point where the chain opened the flesh of the neck. On occasions like this, part of the flesh surrounded the chain, scarring over it, while the other half of its neck hung rotting.
