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Paris
WATCH: Outrage after animal rights group steals puppy from homeless man
The activists have defended their actions, and claimed the dog was being mistreated.
ALMOST 200,000 people have signed an online petition to launch an investigation, after an animal rights group in France was recorded stealing a puppy from a homeless man.
The short clip shows two activists from Cause Animale du Nord, based in the northern city of Lille, struggling with a homeless man on a busy street in Paris, before wrestling away his puppy.
Both the dog and the homeless man appear to be distress during the incident, which took place in the Chatelet district of central Paris.
It has caused a firestorm of controversy in France, with one petition describing it as “an extremely violent act.”
Nowhere [in the group's bye-laws] is it stated that they have the right to remove an animal, without advance notice.
Yet, that is what they did when they violently attacked a homeless man, and took his animal (a puppy) from him.
The petition, which is addressed to a court in Lille, calls for the dog to be “returned to its owner, with compensation” and for a investigation to be launched into the operations of Cause Animale du Nord.
At time of publication, the petition had garnered almost 175,000 signatures.
In response, however, the animal rights group has defended its actions in a Facebook post.
Its president, Antony Blanchard, also made several claims about its owner, whom he refers to as a “Rom” – the French word for Roma.
The video only shows one moment of our intervention. The two-month old puppy [was] unidentified and not vaccinated, in total contravention of French law.
It ended up on the streets of Paris – a puppy that a Roma had drugged so that it would stay calm and not move around.
The dog was completely lethargic, with dilated pupils, [and] you can see in the video that the cries of the puppy are not normal.
The Roma who was illegally holding the puppy didn’t hesitate to grab it, in a way that risked killing it.
According to regional newspaper La Voix du Nord, Blanchard himself is the man featured in the video, wearing a white baseball cap.
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