Animal help in the Dominican Republic - for a better cooperation between humans and animals
When hope bears fruit ...
Dear friends of the Dominican animals,
At last we are online! Hard-working Christian attended to our website and you can follow all our news and pictures on the internet. Now all we need are translators for Spanish, English and French who have time to translate our texts and then we can go international!!! Maybe you know someone who could help?
But not only Christian has been working hard, we have also been able to achieve some good results, for example during our monthly castration-campaign with Dr vet Angel De La Cruz from Sosua. The campaign took place on the 31st of July and the 4th of September. We castrated 20 female and 3 male dogs, 3 cats and one tom-cat and also carried out diverse other medical treatments in our mobile animal hospital. The great thing about it isn't only that because of it much animal-misery will be avoided in future, but that the Dominicans are showing more and more interest in their animals. All the dogs that were brought to us by their owners were in top-form: well fed, well-tended fur, partly equipped with flea-collars and vaccination certificates plus they all had names (for example Coffee and Wheat(beer)) and their owners treated them affectionately. Some even stayed for the whole process and touchingly looked after all of the dogs (not only their own) during the recovery phase. There was much stroking and comforting going on. To see, how at last our educational work is bearing fruits makes us particularly happy as this is still not the case in the rest of the country. As you can see, there is still a lot of work to be done...
During the castration-campaign at the end of July Tamalou brought us a stray dog with four puppies that were only a couple of days old. Unfortunately we had to put two of them to sleep, there was no rescue for them, because their tiny bodies had been completely eaten away by maggots. Heartbeat, temperature and breathing had nearly stopped. To ensure that the mother would be able to bring up her two remaining puppies in peace after the castration and have enough food to produce milk, Tamalou took her in. Two weeks afterwards I received a desperate call from Tamalou, she had found an orphaned baby-cat and urgently needed my help. In spite of the baby-bottles with breeding-milk, massages, warm-water-bottles and caring attention the kitten was grumpy and meowing miserably. When stray-dog Mia fed her puppies on Tamalous terrace, I chanced an experiment. We pacified and stroked Mia and I put the kitten on one of her teats, whereupon it started to suck greedily. After five minutes Mia decided that the little being was no danger to her puppies and let it carry on. One hour later, the puppies had already fallen asleep, the little furbull was still sucking on its surrogate mother and only when it was full up, did it fall into a happy and contented sleep. Breast milk and the warmth of a mother cannot be replaced by anything... All four are doing well and were just placed with caring families.
I told you about our paralysed patients Knoedel and Teddy in the last newsletter. Unfortunately we have four more difficult cases...
Mäuschen (Mousie) is one of the river-dogs we castrated in December 2009. During heavy rains in July, Mäuschen was swept away by the water of the swelling river, thrown against a stone and caught behind a bridge, where she couldn't move forwards or backwards and was close to drowning. She didn't only swallow a vast quantity of water, in addition to this all the floating litter drifted into her mouth, amongst other things a big piece of broken glass. Finally a dauntless Dominican saved her more dead than alive from her desperate situation and I was informed about it. Of course I took her with me straight away – she was in deep shock, her spine was heavily bruised, the piece of broken glass had caused severe inner injuries and due to the lack of oxygen she had suffered brain damage. Everybody who knows me knows, that as long as an animal shows a will to live and there is a chance of convalescence I will not give up. For two weeks we fought for Mäuschens life with the help of our homoeopathic veterinarian in Germany, luckily she threw up the broken piece of glass pretty quickly, so that the inner bleeding could at least be stopped.
Since then she has been recovering little by little and is at present learning to walk again. It will take time until she has completely recovered. If she will ever be able to return to the river is questionable, she is still petrified of water, understandably after what she has had to go through. So for the time being she will stay one of our “stationary longtime-patients”...
Stray dog Lila was castrated by us in May 2009. At the beginning of July 2010 she got struck by a motorbike, which was admittedly her fault. Our friend Nicole took Lila in and she was medically provided for by us. Lila too has paralysis of the hind legs. But what made the case more complicated was a big deep heavily bleeding hole, that suddenly formed itself from inside out at her hip. Every day we are fighting for Lilas life...
While I was writing this, a Dominican came to us with
his paralysed puppy – reason for the paralysis???
Still we will try to help it.
I had hardly admitted the little fellow, when a call reached me that a
stray dog who had been struck by a car a short time ago, had been sighted and
was hiding under some crates on the main road of Las Terrenas. Our friend Dan
was so nice to bring the dog to me, because I couldn't drive into the village
with all the patients around. I was expecting the worst, but what I eventually
got to see was one big catastrophe!!!
I thought for a long time about whether I should spare you this sight or not, but since we urgently need financial help for medicine, good food and possible operations for him, and for you to understand with what kind of hard fates we have to deal with every day, I am going to publish the pictures of him. Animal protection work isn't only about “happy” moments after all – it is tough and brings you – emotionally as well – to your absolute limits.
“Catastrophe” - that's what we called the poor guy – may be able to survive. It will take a long time and we might have to amputate his leg, but we won't give up hope and will do everything in our power to make him get well. Firstly we will have to fight the infection and nurse him back to health, because in his present terrible starving condition he naturally won’t stand a chance.
That's why I set up the project “sponsorship”. Here you will find animals, partly stray dogs, partly animals belonging to poor Dominicans, who don't have enough money for food, and some longtime-patients as well, whose supply we can only assure when the expenses for them are incured. More information here.
I would like to share another thing with you. In spite of all his bad experiences with human beings and inspite of all the pain he is having to go through Catastrophe still looks at me with hopeful eyes, he still wags his tail when he sees me and still puts his paw into my hand. Animals can forgive the worst experiences and keep their trust in a better world – we all can learn so much from them...
Thank you for your attention, your help and your dedication, please don't let the Dominican animals down, they need you.
With kind regards
Miriam
PS: Since the writing and the picture editing take time, some events change before they get published. Such as in the case of “Catastrophe”. The poor guy didn't make it, he died peacefully and without pain in our arms. Even though we lost the fight, we were still able to give him some love, warmth and security in the last hours of his life. We grieve very much for our sweet, lovely and couragous fellow.