Pet owners call for change after reports Auckland Council contractor dumped dead cats in ditch, bin

Allan Blackman with his cat Muffin

Pet owners are calling for change after multiple reports emerged that at least one worker at an Auckland Transport contractor attempted to dump dead cats instead of taking them to an animal shelter.

Muffin, a microchipped cat who belonged to Allan Blackman and his partner Rebecca Jelley, died after a car hit her on the weekend of May 23.

Mr Blackman said by the time they rushed to the site where Muffin was, she wasn’t there. Little had they known then that Muffin would end up dumped in a ditch in Henderson Valley.

About 24 hours after they believed Muffin was picked up, Ms Jelley called Auckland Council. Mr Blackman said staff told his partner there wasn’t a record Muffin had been collected.

“Then I rang … [the person on the phone] then got in touch with Fulton Hogan,” Mr Blackman said. Fulton Hogan is contracted by Auckland Transport to collect animals killed on roads.

“That’s when it came back that the cat had been severely mangled and it had been buried in Huia.”

By the fourth phone call to council, Mr Blackman was told a contractor had taken Muffin to the council-owned Henderson Animal Shelter. They then figured out the contractor was Fulton Hogan’s Henderson branch.

“They didn’t mention anything about the cat being scanned,” he said.

“It was just a series of confused, mixed messages.”

After a visit to the Henderson branch, Fulton Hogan staff took them to a “cliff” among the dense bush on Lone Kauri Rd.

The site was about 20km from the Henderson branch. The Henderson Animal Shelter, where dead animals were meant to be taken, was about 6km away.

“We were told that she had been ‘thrown over a cliff’ in this particular place.

“Fulton Hogan sent a team to get [Muffin] back for us, so we went along as well.”

But Mr Blackman said Muffin wasn’t at the site even though one of the staff members present “was the person who picked her up and disposed of her”.

“So Rebecca’s brother Edward asked for a log of the GPS details of the truck that the guy was driving.”

Fulton Hogan called about an hour later and said they had recovered Muffin from Vineyard Rd in Henderson Valley, about 5km from their Henderson branch, Mr Blackman said.

Fulton Hogan returned Muffin — who was in one piece and not “mangled” — and provided the GPS coordinates of the place she was found.

At the Vineyard Rd site, a ditch, Mr Blackman said there looked to be remains of other animals and “at least two cats in plastic bags”.

Photos supplied to 1 NEWS, too graphic to publish, appear to show an animal's ribcage attached to a spine at the site. Mr Blackman said when he showed the photos to vets, they had thought it was a dog’s.

He said he also found what appeared to be implants for a dog and “very much doubted” someone would dump their pet in a ditch after spending so much money on them.

“Losing a pet is a traumatic experience. But, having to get through all of this on top of losing Muffin, it’s been emotional.”

Following the ordeal, Mr Blackman said Gavin Riddle, Auckland regional manager of Fulton Hogan, called him on Wednesday morning.

“He apologised profusely for everything that we’d been through and assured us that since last Friday that their policy or protocol has changed.”

He said Mr Riddle told him that all dead animals collected by Fulton Hogan would be photographed, bagged, then taken to an animal shelter.

“This is probably the best outcome that we could have hoped for out of this, because there must have been something wrong with the system prior to this that this sort of thing could happen and that, seemingly, it had happened to other people as well,” Mr Blackman said.

“I have to say that the [Fulton Hogan] person we dealt with while we were looking for Muffin was extraordinarily patient. He was shocked about the whole situation and offered to pay for Muffin’s cremation.”

He said while he “applauded” that Fulton Hogan had changed its policy, it was ultimately Auckland Transport, a council-controlled organisation, who contracted the company.

“We would like to see the council check the situation and make sure that the contractors are, in fact, doing what they say that they’re doing."

Mr Blackman said if people bothered to microchip pets and happened to lose them, they should be “secure in the knowledge that the body is going to be scanned and we’re not going to have this random dumping”.

“There needs to be a system that is verifiable, that if someone rings and says there’s a dead animal on the side of the road, that call is logged, people go out, they take a photo, they scan it, they take it to the animal shelter … and then it’s looked up in the record and reunited with owners.

“Apparently that is meant to be the current system at the moment. That’s what is meant to happen.”

Fulton Hogan did not respond to multiple requests for comment, but told RNZ in a statement: "The actions of the individual concerned are contrary to common decency and our company values and procedures around how we recover the bodies of pets, and we are currently dealing with the individual in an appropriate manner.

"We have expressed our sincere apologies to the family for the distress they have been through, and have also reiterated to our teams the duty of care we have when collecting deceased animals from the roading network."

‘Losing your cat is traumatic enough’

West Auckland resident Kelly Mann said she believed her microchipped cat Jess was killed on the morning of May 9.

Kelly Mann's cat Jess

As with Muffin’s owners, what followed was multiple calls to Auckland Council to try and find her cat. She said a Fulton Hogan contractor later told her he was going to dump her cat’s body in the bin.

“I made my first call to the council within hours [Jess was killed] on Saturday night,” Ms Mann said.

She said she was able to link two queries logged with Auckland Council about where she believed Jess had been collected after being killed — one from herself and one from a woman who had posted on a community Facebook group.

“I made two calls that day and I was given two sets of advice.

“First one they just took my details and the woman assured me that if Jess had been collected by a contractor that I would be notified and that her microchip would be scanned.”

But Ms Mann said she started making further inquiries after people who had also lost pets began contacting her.

“I was getting messages over and over on my Facebook from people saying ‘Honestly, that’s not actually how this happens,’ and ‘you need to keep at the council because they are useless.’”

She then made the second call and was passed onto a new person, who had told her to ring the SPCA.

Ms Mann said when she rang the SPCA, they told her they weren’t able to help.

“And then I rang [Auckland Council] back on Sunday, and that was when I got a really nice woman … who was reading off the manual. I could hear her reading off (it).”

Ms Mann said the woman then told her the job would’ve been given to contractor Urban Maintenance Systems.

When Ms Mann called UMS, she said they told her they didn’t find Jess at the address council had passed on.

She then tried to contact Auckland Transport. She said she left a message but then “never heard back from them”.

She said out of “sheer luck”, when she called Fulton Hogan, the man who picked Jess up answered the phone. Ms Mann said he told her Jess was in the back of his truck.

Less than an hour later, Ms Mann said he was at her doorstep with Jess.

“Had I got someone else on the phone, I never would’ve gotten Jess back,” she said.

“[He was saying] ‘I’m so sorry, I was going to throw your cat in the bin because I didn’t know what else to do.’”

Ms Mann said she suspected he hadn’t called Auckland Council about Jess because “nothing was correlating” when she called council.

But she said she didn’t blame him. She said the way the worker reacted seemed very genuine.

“I don’t feel he did anything wrong because the process wasn’t clear to him.”

Ms Mann said Auckland Council and its contractors must have a better process of communicating to each other when dead animals are collected.

She said Auckland Council and workers’ bosses needed to have a way of checking where an animal’s body ended up after collection.

“My message to them would be losing your cat is traumatic enough,” she said.

“But, to then have to go through all that stress, all that miscommunication, different messaging, and then finding out your cat was ultimately going to be treated like rubbish, that is heartbreaking for somebody that is already at their lowest.

“My cat was going to meet an end where she was going to be put in a rubbish bin. I can’t tell you how much I was so upset by that because all I wanted was closure.

“I just wanted to bury her in my backyard.”

Ms Mann said until then, she didn’t want to call the council about dead or lost cats as it risked the owner not ever getting their cat back.

She said she only got Jess back because of her persistence and luck.

“I actually had people private messaging me after I found Jess saying ‘How did you get her? I still haven't found my cat. It's been three years and, you know, the council had the job.’

“I think that happens a lot more than we realise.”

'Distressing situation'

An Auckland Transport spokesperson told 1 NEWS they could confirm Muffin’s case involved Fulton Hogan “and Auckland Transport has taken it up with them”.

The spokesperson said it was a “really distressing situation” and Fulton Hogan “is treating the matter extremely seriously”.

“As this is now an employment relations matter, between the employee and employer, we are unable to comment further.”

In regards to Jess’ case, the spokesperson said Auckland Transport was also unable to comment further “as it’s between Fulton Hogan and the employee”.

Auckland Council manager of animal management Sarah Anderson said: “When a customer calls in to report a deceased pet, the job is lodged through to Auckland Transport.”

Ms Anderson said Auckland Transport had an agreement with council that their contractors would take deceased pets to a local council-owned animal shelter.

She said staff at shelters “make every effort” to reunite pets with families.

“We scan all deceased pets that we receive for a microchip. If one is not found, we check our missing pets list as well as Facebook postings and with local vets.

“If we are unable to match the pet to these lists or find the owner, the pet is privately cremated.”

Auckland Council said it was unable to comment any further as cases were handled through Auckland Transport rather than council.

“We are very sorry to learn about Muffin and our thoughts are with her family,” Ms Anderson said.

Auckland Council general manager of customer services Jon Andrews said he was “disappointed” to hear about Mr Blackman’s and Ms Mann’s experience when calling the council’s call centre for information, and asked them to get in touch. 

“We’d like to offer our sincere apologies to the customer for any confusion caused by the information we provided, during what was clearly a distressing time.”

Nothing new?

Another story of Fulton Hogan’s alleged mistreatment of dead cats pre-dates the birth of the Auckland supercity and Auckland Transport.

Casey Harwood, then a Browns Bay resident on Auckland’s North Shore, said her cat Buddy was dumped in the Weiti River adjacent to Fulton Hogan’s North Harbour branch in 2004.

Ms Harwood said she was in the car with a friend at the time she saw her cat taken away.

“We were at the lights right outside my house. A couple of cars up, we could see a Fulton Hogan ute.”

She said she saw a man scoop up a dead cat. She was able to recognise Buddy because of his distinctive appearance.

“I caught it like it was in slow motion and realised it was Buddy just as he chucked her in the back of the ute and took off,” she said.

“I’ve never seen anything like it since. It was really surreal.

“There was nothing we could do. We couldn’t exactly catch up to him.”

The witness with Ms Harwood at the time said they’d seen the same thing and told 1 NEWS they remembered feeling “horrified”.

Ms Harwood said she then called up Fulton Hogan and talked to a woman “on and off all afternoon”.

“I asked her if I could please pick [Buddy] up because we were going to bury him at the pet cemetery.

“It must’ve been about five o’clock at the end of the working day when she finally said ‘she’s been chucked into a local water feature at the back of our premises in Silverdale’.”

Ms Harwood said she never got her cat back.

Fulton Hogan did not respond to requests for comment about what happened to Buddy or Jess. 

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