This Wednesday, the Nice criminal court sentenced a couple to a permanent ban on keeping a pet, in addition to a one-year suspended prison sentence. With dozens of cats and dogs in their apartment, the court considered that the man and woman “were guilty of the crime of abandonment given the very seriously deteriorated state of health” of the animals.
In its judgment, the court also ordered the couple to pay to the animal rights associations, civil parties, more than 150,000 euros in damages for moral harm and for the costs of caring for the cats and dogs found in the apartment.
“It’s like telling a woman she won’t have any more children.”
At the end of the judgment, the owner of the animals, a 68-year-old woman, indicated that she did not want to “give up”. “Who would not appeal against such injustice? “It’s like telling a woman that she won’t have any more children,” she said, adding that she had “abandoned herself so as not to abandon them.”
In 2023, police officers responding to a neighborhood dispute found dozens of animals in each room of the couple’s home. All were dehydrated, malnourished and covered in parasites and lesions. In total, the police counted a total of 159 cats and seven dogs locked in this 80 m2 apartment. To make matters worse, investigators found the bodies of at least two cats and two puppies in the bathroom.
“They were the loves of my life but I slipped”
“They were the loves of my life but I slipped,” the owner explained at the hearing, repeating that the state of disrepair of the apartment and the animals was only occasional. In court, she assured that she was looking for solutions but that she found herself helpless because of an infection which struck the cats and the heatwave which had made her ill.
His partner, aged 52, handled the contracts for their cleaning company alone. Owing a rental debt of 8,000 euros, the couple was also subject to eviction proceedings.
In 2014, the couple had already been the subject of an investigation closed without further action because they lived with 13 cats and a dog in an 18 m2 studio. The woman then collected her parents’ three cats and three dogs in 2018, before taking around thirty cats from an abandoned building, believing that they were at risk of being poisoned. They then reproduced.