Montrose - Daily Press

MONTROSE — In a fluke of tragic timing, a litter of kittens reportedly discarded in a Dumpster were hauled to the city dumpsite Monday morning.

The young cats are presumed dead, likely crushed beneath all the waste, animal control said.

“No animal should have to die that way,” Animal Control Officer Kimberly Scott said, adding that she was “disgusted” with whoever had dumped the kittens.

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Scott said a man walking into his workplace on Uncompahgre Avenue heard kittens crying from a Dumpster near Centennial Plaza. The man immediately alerted authorities.

“Just in that short timeframe, the city workers came though and picked up all the trash in the area,” Scott said.

The truck then proceeded along its route to the dump station. Though animal control responded immediately and alerted the route driver, the load was deposited at the waste site and a frantic search through the trash yielded nothing.

“As you can imagine, there was a lot of trash. There’s no recovery from that,” Scott said. “It’s just disturbing.”

No one knew how many kittens might have been inside the Dumpster, but they were old enough to be heard wailing from inside the receptacle.

Scott said the reporting party was adamant about the Dumpster. Though she checked the area, there was no other place where kittens could likely have been concealed.

Everyone hoped the man was wrong, she said, but even after she double-checked the area, it still appeared the kittens had been in the Dumpster.

There’s no excuse for throwing cats away, Scott said.

 The animal shelter works to adopt out cats and also participates in various pet transfer programs, sending cats to shelters that are short on adoptable pets.

Deliberately putting kittens in the trash is chargeable as abandonment and, in this case, cruelty under the state statute, which provides for felony-level charges.

“This is pretty blatant. Their intent was not for those kittens to be found,” Scott said. “They were disposing of them.”

Worst of all, she said, this sort of crime is not unheard of in Montrose.

“This is not the first time this has happened. It’s an awful way for a living creature to have to meet its demise. It just saddens me we have people like that in the community.”

Scott said there was a similar incident last year. A few years before, someone spotted a bag moving inside a Dumpster. Inside it was a dead mother cat and her kittens. Scott said that miraculously, two kittens survived, were nursed back to health and adopted out.

The passerby who heard the kittens Monday is not responsible for what happened, she stressed, and the trash truck driver had no way of knowing until it was too late.

“The only person responsible for what happened today is the person who put the animals in that Dumpster,” Scott said.

“You would think they understood the results. That’s not a humane death. They’re (kittens) being crushed under hundreds of pounds of refuse.”

Anyone with information about this apparent crime is asked to call animal control at 240-1487 or dispatch at 252-4010.

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