Excmo. Ayuntamiento de Martos, Please Do The Right Thing (Please Share)

 It has been a tough couple of years with this Coof thing and all, but living in Spain has had its advantages, most importantly the weather has meant we have spent a good proportion of our time outside. I've even built a Tiki bar in our covered area on our downstairs patio.

Despite battling the pandemic and all the financial hardships that it brought, The Spanish administration has also delivered one of the most important pieces of legislation in recent years. It has declared that animals are sentient creatures and it is against the law to mistreat them and even listed some of what they term mistreatments. As in certain parts of the UK, animal abandonment is a big problem over here and in the six and a half years we have been living here we have done as much as we can to assist our local rescue centre by fostering and even adopting abandoned dogs.

For all these years the Asociación para la Defensa y Adopción de Animales Ciudad de la Peña has used us to foster new born puppies, elderly and vey sick and injured dogs. We are able to assist with these specifically as we don't work and can therefore devote more hours than many of the fosterers who have to earn a living in addition to the volunteering. We have no objection to this as we love animals and devoted large parts of our time (and money) to doing similar in the UK, however, it has become more and more difficult for the organisation to help as our local council, Excmo. Ayuntamiento de Martos so good in many things, particularly in beautifying the town, has failed to give the Rescue people the proper licence. 

A Recent quote on one of the rescue posts read "Debido a la falta de colaboración del Ayuntamiento para la renovación de la cesión de los terrenos del refugio, en el cual hemos tenido que paralizar la actividad y del mismo modo a la tenencia de la licencia para poder realizar la actividad"  

This translates as;

Due to the lack of cooperation of the City Council for the renewal of the assignment of the lands of refuge, in which we have had to paralyze the activity and similarly to the possession of the license to be able to perform the activity.

Our living room has now become an obstacle course of protective barriers as we have a dog that has been beaten severely and now has a repaired and healing broken leg and another that has been hit by at least one car and has a crushed (and untreatable) pelvis. 

At the same time, we are coping with a Podenco with dementia, or possibly brain damage as she was hit by a car some time ago, A puppy whose owner is having trouble coping with, so just a temporary foster we hope. We also have an abandoned small
podenco cross, an old girl, an abandoned Papillon cross, Our own German Shepard/Sausage dog cross (a rescue,) 2 miniature poodles and a rescued Chihuahua cross.

As I said earlier, we do this out of love for the animals and ask for nothing in return, the love the dogs give us is reward enough.

We do however plead with our council for help for the rescue, I implore   Excmo. Ayuntamiento de Martos to contact the Rescue and implement the licences and permissions so that much-needed building and repairs can go ahead.  

Thank you for reading this far and I only ask that you share it far and wide and if you can, ask the council to expedite the permissions.