Post-lockdown outing ends in poisoning deaths of pet dogs
An outing in the countryside on Saturday to let off steam after the lifting of Israel’s third coronavirus lockdown ended in the deaths from poisoning of two pet dogs.
Four friends — two from northern Israel, and two from the south — had arranged to walk along an area where the Beersheba stream enters the Besor River, near Kibbutz Tzeelim, southwest of Beersheba in southern Israel.
The two friends from the north each brought their dogs Ketem (Spot) and Gulliver along and let them run free after their monthlong lockdown confinement.
Some 20 minutes after the two dogs — a cocker spaniel and a Belgian shepherd — had drunk water from the stream, they went into convulsions, frothing at the mouth, and died.
Moran Ajami, Ketem’s owner, told Israel Radio, “Those dogs were our life. After a monthlong lockdown, we went out on walk, to stretch our legs and to see [lovely] landscapes. The dogs were happy. We walked along the stream. We didn’t know that it was polluted. There was no fence and we didn’t smell anything. Our dogs love nature and love to run. Everything was fabulous until this traumatic incident. It hurts so badly that we couldn’t save them.”
Yannai Aloush from Beersheba told the local Mynet news site that the friends had sought a place to cross the stream so that they could look for mushrooms on the other side.
He posted on Facebook that a member of the Tzeelim Kibbutz later told the group that locals had known for years that the stream was polluted and never went near it. Aloush said there were no warning signs. The group had not known that froth on a stream (seen in the picture) was a sign of pollution.
“We tried to get hold of a vet to save them but within a short time the two dogs were dead. It all happened so fast. It’s so shocking. We felt helpless,” he added.
טיול שנגמר באסון גוליבר וכתם – הכלבים של שחר ומורן מתו כ 20 דקות לאחר שתייה מערוץ הנחל שעובר מול קיבוץ צאלים, (בערך…
Posted by ינאי אלוש on Saturday, February 13, 2021
The Israel Nature and Parks Authority immediately took water samples from the stream and checked the land around it for poison, but as of Sunday, the source of the poisoning remained unclear
Dalia Tal, responsible for streams and rivers at the environmental organization Zalul, told Israel Radio that the stream could have been contaminated by sewage from the West Bank city of Hebron, or from the chemical plants of Ramat Hovav in the Negev, although the latter was less likely.
It is against the law to put poison down on land in open spaces.
“Whether or not the source of the poison turns out to be the stream, this is an opportunity to draw public attention to the fact that most streams in Israel are polluted,” Tal told The Times of Israel.
Most streams were only sampled a couple of times a year for statistical purposes, with those flowing into the Sea of Galilee perhaps more often, she went on. But even the Sea of Galilee’s tributaries have been polluted recently by leptospirosis.
In October, the Health Ministry and Environmental Protection Ministry advised against visiting northern streams, after unsafe levels of contaminants at a number of locations were believed to have caused an outbreak of the potentially fatal disease. Some 50 people were suspected or confirmed as having been infected by the bacterial infection, which is transmitted via animal urine.
Tal advised people never to drink or let their pets drink from streams, and said people with sensitive or compromised immune systems should not bathe even in spring-fed rivers such as Keziv in northern Israel.
Pollution warning signs, she continued, were the responsibility of the polluters, most of whom would be highly unlikely to want to publicize their actions.