Puppies found dead on doorstep

They were among a litter of nine pups discovered on Tuesday morning last week by Margorioita Owad, from Oakgrove, Millfield in Buncrana, who made the shocking discovery when she opened her front door to take her son to school. The pups had been left outside her home overnight.

The incident has angered Joanne Mullan, a volunteer at the Rainbow Animal Shelter at Eglinton, where the pups were taken before being sent for specialist care to a unit in Belfast.

"Margorioita found two of the nine pups dead and the other sevenscreaming with hunger and shivering from the cold. In panic she took the pups inside to the heat, took her son to school and rang the Rainbow Animal Shelter as soon as she returned home," said Joanne.

Margorioita has no idea where the pups came from and brought them to Rainbow on Tuesday evening, where a foster carer was lined up to care for them until they went on to another sanctuary in Bangor that has a facility for young pups.

Joanne continued: "The pups were about three weeks old, which is too young to be taken away from their mother.

"Pups as young as this need fed every two hours so to have gone all night with no food and exposed to minus temperatures it is not suprising that two of them died.

"Whoever is responsible for abandoning these defenceless and vulnerable pups should be ashamed of themselves. We would also have major welfare concerns for the mother of these pups," she said adding: "This is yet another example of how irresponsible it is to not neuter your dog, whether it is male or female. Northern Ireland has the highest destruction rate of healthy dogs in the whole of the UK.

"In 2007 7,892 dogs were killed in pounds in the UK, of those Northern Ireland killed 3,456 of these dogs - that's 43.79 per cent of the total. By comparisonNorthern Ireland has 2.9 per cent of the total human population in the UK.

"People need to be responsible pet owners. If you have a dog then neuter it."