Pollensa animal refuge breaks with Council

POLLENSA'S animal refuge centre will no longer be collaborating with the local council, Josefina Vivancos who has managed the shelter for the past 28 years said yesterday.

Vivancos had already said last week that from now on, she will stop providing homes for stray and abandoned animals that the council catches through independent operators. “We want to continue functioning under our own rules as an animal refuge,” she explained. “We will never put a healthy animal down.” For eight years, the Pollensa Animal Refuge has had a close professional relationship with the Council. An agreement had committed the town hall to paying the refuge 60'000 euros a year for catching and keeping abandoned animals at the shelter but the council is now owing last year's instalment.

The council has decided to change the modus operandi and said that it would now have a direct contract with a company for catching the strays and that it would put a maintenance contract out to public tender for those organisations interested in housing the animals.

The Animal Refuge Centre refused however to become part of the arrangement because were it to have accepted the council's most recent terms and conditions, then there would have been a limit on the time that they would have been funded to keep animals at the shelter.

Vivancos made it crystal clear yesterday: “It is I who have broken off the relationship with the council,” she said. Vivancos claimed that since its inception, the ethos of the shelter was to rehouse abandoned animals.

She said that now the council were wanting to impose their own rules which included the destruction of healthy animals if they were not rehoused within less than a month. “I won't take in the animals which the council catches if I have to accept their terms,” she insisted. “I have decided not to have anything more to do with the council in this regard.”