Thousands of holidaygoers in France are abandoning their pets on the way to the coast or countryside, local shelters say, with one organization already taking in 12,000 animals this summer

• French animal shelters and officials are raising the alarm over a surge in pet-abandonment cases.
• About 100,000 pets are abandoned in France each year, Transport Minister Clément Beaune said.

Vacationers in France are abandoning their pets in droves as they head to their holiday spots, animal shelters and local authorities have said.

The Society for Protection of Animals, an animal-welfare organization headquartered in Paris, put out an urgent call Saturday for donations and adoptions, saying its "exhausted" teams had rescued more than 12,000 animals this summer alone.

Pet-abandonment cases are on the rise in France, and space is "sorely lacking" in shelters around the country despite caretakers "pushing the walls" to save as many as possible, its website said.

"Our shelters are overflowing and so many animals are waiting on families," the group wrote on Facebook.

About 100,000 pets are abandoned in France each year, including 60,000 in the summer, Transport Minister Clément Beaune said on August 7 while visiting a shelter.

"This indicates that there are still many people who go on vacation and leave an animal by the roadside or at a highway rest stop," Beaune said.

Pet owners, eager to rush off to the French beach or countryside, sometimes drop their animals off at shelters quietly in boxes or leave them at a location and call animal organizations to pick them up, the BBC reported in 2020.

France is now "first place in Europe for pet abandonment," the animal-welfare organization Brigitte Bardot Foundation wrote on June 29.

The organization supports up to 10,000 animals and said a "growing influx of abandoned or stray animals" was overwhelming its facilities.

The wave of abandonment cases is likely in part due to a surge in adoptions earlier in the COVID-19 pandemic, when the Ministry of the Interior allowed people to leave their homes during lockdowns to take on a pet and relieve then overcrowded shelters.

Tens of thousands of households, suffering from inflation and bleak economic conditions, appear to have since stopped caring for their new pets, given the influx reported by the SPA.

It's illegal in France to abandon a pet in the wild. New laws in July 2022 raised the punishment from two years in prison to three, with a maximum fine of $32,740.