I’ll start this newsletter by informing about the help we are sending to Tg-Jiu shelter. We managed to gather up a truck load of useful things to be taken to Tg-Jiu! This time we have lots of other things too besides food that covers 2/3 of total (3500 kg).

Here are some photos of the load we collected from different places. During the last weeks Karo of Faunatar Vantaa’s Myyrmanni and Faunatar Lempäälä’s Ideapark and Sari of Faunatar Vantaa’s Jumbo took over the leads and miraculously gathered up hundreds of kilos of dog food and encouraged all Faunatar- pet stores to donate in total of 28 cages for transportation.

Here’s a photo of c. 1200 kg of dog food mainly donated by Royal Canin.

The boxes on the right were donated by Faunatar in Vantaa’s Myyrmanni.

Dog food and cages donated by Faunatar pet stores

Heaters and a hotplate bought for the warehouse of the shelter, milk substitute for puppies and a toolbox
 

Donations given by Hesy and some collected by private people
 

A van full of dog food and a couple sacks of horse food, an another car full of dog food, horse equipment and other necessary things
 

Heartfelt thanks for all of you for your support!

It’s already spring at the shelter and according to Patricia, the minute the weather warmed up a bit the shelter was properly cleaned up for the season. There is always a lot of cleaning up to do after the snow and ice melt away but you can’t help but start working.

Here are photos of some of the dogs living in the warehouse of the shelter:

Fortunately there have now been three workers (of which one is a woman) helping at the shelter half the day. It has eased up Carmena and Patricia’s life a bit. They can now do important chores like take dogs to a vet, handle police business and search for a site for the new shelter. Now when the snow has melted it’s much easier to check out sites. We have seen many sites for the past year but there have always been numerous reasons for why these sites haven’t been suitable for us. I received a letter from Carmena today, saying that she had talked with a shelter-keeper from Bucharest of the hardships of maintaining a shelter nearly isolated from everything. This shelter-keeper in question takes care of a shelter with no general road leading to the shelter, no running water, electricity and heating only with a generator of their own etc. Every winter they have to deal with the fact that not every day they are even able to get to the shelter to feed the dogs.

Of course we are hopeful that we’d get lucky and we’d find a suitable site for the shelter. Sure it’s only the beginning for the enormous job to build a functional animal welfare centre or at least a dog and cat shelter. At least for the time being the EU support isn’t available for projects like this and sponsors are typically very hard to find. Despite all this, we must have hope and dreams in our heart as well as believe that someday our dreams will come true! We have already achieved so many remarkable things though we started out of nothing.

Dona and Daria are doing just fine and Carmena tells they enjoy living outside as wild and free. Both horses love taking mud baths!

Carmena

I’m sure we all share the concern over Carmena’s health and strength. Though Carmena is experiencing some hard times and is still forced to deny any social life of her own, she doesn’t pour on us or her other close ones her exhaustion, anger towards everything that doesn’t go the way it should or sense of insufficiency. She is always putting first the animals she takes care of. Carmena has been forced to postpone her doctoral thesis since there is simply no time to study. It’s important that we give Carmena the strength she needs every day in order to keep fighting for animal rights where there are no local supporters - on the contrary, there are more of those who wish to slow us down.

Carmena still keeps visiting at the city shelter of Tg-Jiu every day and sometimes takes sick dogs under her wings. The city shelter hasn’t changed the way they treat dogs. Here are some of the dogs Carmena has brought from the city shelter to nurse back to health.

  

This old dog that’s nearly blind Carmena rescued near to the city shelter from a deep pit where the dog had fallen. The city shelter staff, police or firefighters weren’t interested in helping so Carmena borrowed 10 m long ladders, dragged them on the spot, lured the dog closer and carried him to safety. Carmena named the dog Mosu.

Before the next travelogue you’ll be getting at least one newsletter to read.

Best regards,

Kiia 

- AK