Please forward this email to your mayor, Pilar Varela Diaz, and let her know that she will likely be receiving many other letters, emails and phone calls about this terrible shelter. Please ask her to do everything in her power to see that a humane shelter, and decent treatment of animals ensues.

Also, since you are hoping many of us will come to visit Aviles, please become involved yourself in ending the horror these animals are experiencing. Please work to see that a proper shelter is built and that the animals are humanely treated. How animals are treated says a great deal about a culture.

Thank you sir for forwarding this to your mayor.

Your name, the country you live in,

Pilar Varela Diaz, Mayor of Aviles Calle Jovellanos 1 Aviles Asturias Spain Dear Mayor Varela, It has recently come to my attention that there is widespread animal neglect taking place in a ‘shelter’ at Aviles, Asturia.

As one ventures closer to the ‘shelter’, an overwhelming stench assaults your sense of smell, an omen of the horrid conditions where the eighty dogs and cats are forced to live. A sign at the entrance warns that “No animals are picked up or delivered’.

Dogs and cats barely survive in this hell of Avilés, sharing their space with tons of rubble and dirt, with rats, in cages consisting of pallets and mattresses. These animals are subjected to constant confinement, living among their own faeces, with no sanitation, never leaving the dirt in which they live, condemned to share accommodation with rats and fleas that move between the garbage around them.

When one approaches, the desperate barks from these suffering animals becomes deafening, People in the neighbourhood know about these deplorable conditions, yet when they wish to investigate they are always stopped by Miluce, a ‘middle-aged woman’, who is causing the suffering.

A complaint has been lodged in the Court of Aviles by El Refugio against the woman in charge of the ‘shelter’. These charges state ‘ “The animals are housed in a massive and uncontrolled environment, with a variety of breeds and their state of health shows an abysmal lack of food, poor hygiene, lack of standard veterinary care, unsanitary conditions, surrounded by faeces and urine, among rodents and other vermin (fleas …), causing a risk not only for animals but also for public health. We believe that these facts can now be considered criminal.’

Yet the woman claims she maintains a ‘terrific’ facility which is all to often used as a cover-up and is never the case. The animals are being kept near the district of La Luz Aviles in the road that joins the A-8 in this neighbourhood.

It is known that this constant state of neglect and abuse has gone on for at least ten years, allegedly resulting in death in some cases, because the facilities are inappropriate for the care of the animals housed there.

Won’t you please investigate this situation? Surely you do not wish to see this cruelty continue in the Municipality of Avilés.

It is clear that the Municipality of Avilés is in dire need of a proper shelter, where animals may live in clean, humane conditions.

And you should know that we will not go away. The world is watching this information and video and there will be a lot of people who will not come to Asturias because they know the truth of the city beyond the lovely beaches and historic buildings.

They are aware of the hell of the ‘garbage of abandoned dogs’ in Avila and that the Mayor,in 10 years, has done NOTHING ABOUT IT.

Thank you very much

Name and country