Pro Animals Finland registered association aims at helping animals in need by focusing its support on one long-term project at a time. In practice PAFi's support is channeled through a local cooperation partner. Our first project is to support Pro Animals Romania, a small animal protection association that runs single-handedly a shelter of over 400 stray dogs in the city of Targu-Jiu, Romania. Spaying & neutering and educating of local people are the further cornerstones of Pro Animals Romania. Additionally the association is also responsible for monitoring the animal protection issues of the Gorj County.

Greetings from PAFi's president!

We founded our association Pro Animals Finland (PAFi) in September 2005. We started out of nothing – only the local instance and location were chosen and heads were full of plans and ideas. Of course before founding the association, we had done months of research in e.g. who would be our first cooperation partner as well as specifying our policy and future plans. From the beginning the basis of our activity has been in helping communities that have true problems and helping these communities locally since we must help where the problems really are and try to have an impact on the problems rationally and effectively.

Already in the beginning we got to cooperate closely with Pro Animals Romania, a local animal protection association protecting animals in the city of Tg-Jiu (c. 100 000 residents). Pro Animals Romania is also the oldest registered, non-profitable association of Gorj County. In April 2009 there were c. 300 different kinds of associations in Gorj County of which Pro Animals Romania was the most active and the only one focused entirely on animal protection and welfare. The founders of Pro Animals Romania have a profound feel to the local authorities in developing animal protection matters during their 10 years of activity.

During year 2006 we managed to implement a 2-week spaying & neutering-campaign which enabled the locals to bring their own pets for a free neutering. We also launched some of our long-term key projects in Romania, including local education programmes for different age groups and therapy dog programme. During year 2007-2009 we focused on developing these projects.

This all has demanded a lot: strong vision, dependable local cooperation partner and loyal supporters. We have achieved already much in a short time period but there is yet much to be done. In Tg-Jiu only a bunch of animals have proper living conditions and we still have great challenges ahead of us that in order to implement we need not only buoyancy but support from friends of animals.

Our greatest challenge is to build in cooperation with Pro Animals Romania an EU-standard quality animal welfare centre with versatile facilities including a veterinary clinic and start education and international volunteer programme. Our aim is to guide the locals and especially the poor people of rural areas to understand the great importance of animal protection in improving the welfare of people.

During this time we have worked for animals, we have been glad to notice that we have so many people here in Finland with love for animals and strong will to help.

Who has no courage to dream, has no power to fight.
Let’s make our dream come true together!

Best regards, Kiia