colombopetrescue

Reply to Amila

Dear Amila,

if you are really concerned about the fact, that we have too many dogs in Kandy, please help to educate the people, to get their female dogs sterilized instead of dumping unwanted female pups on the street. Please inform them also, that we offer free sterilizations in five clinics, so it does not cost them a penny to solve the stray-dog-problem in Kandy.
Please also create awareness amongst your countrymen, that once they adopted a dog, it is their responsibility to care for it for life, it is not fair to throw a dog out on the road because it contacted a skin-disease, or it grew old, or because its owner has decided to shift, to migrate or to buy a pedigree-puppy.
I have lived in Sri Lanka for 25 years without doing a job because I have a small income from Germany, so I did not have to work, and have spend all this time in voluntary social work.

When 1999 the first Kandy animal-welfare-organization was founded I became a member and started caring for animals in the village, getting them sterilized and treated for mange and other illnesses. In October 2002 I read an article of the KMC-Vet Dr.Jayasinghe in the papers, that he was willing to embark on a humane programme for the strays of Kandy, so I gave him a call and we met at the dog-pound in Gohagoda to talk about this. A few days later I met him again in his office to introduce a Swiss lady, who wanted to sponsor bimonthly sterilization-camps in Kandy and after another week the Swiss lady and Rohini de Silva entered into a verbal agreement with him and the Mayor of Kandy, that from now on the dogs in the dog-pound at Gohagoda would not be killed, but they would be sterilized and returned to the place of capture. In the beginning the Mayor had some objections against returning the dogs to the place of capture, but he also knew, that it would be impossible to find homes for all the dogs, and since most of the dogs, which were caught by the KMC dog-catchers were dogs from homes anyway, it was finally accepted, that we would return them except for those, which were caught because of complaints and of course those, which needed to stay longer anyhow because they needed treatment or they have been rendered handicapped by road-accidents.
Very often the members of our group take such dogs home when they cannot be returned to the street after sterilization, I have 35 such dogs at home at the moment, Rohini has 65 and Margaret 20, other members look after 5 to 15 dogs, these dogs are fed by us privately, not by SOFA. The funds SOFA receives from friends, who have seen our work and wish to support it, are being used to pay for the sterilizations and treatment, to feed the dogs in Gohagoda and to pay the workers, who are cooking the food for the dogs, cleaning their kennels etc.
The members of SOFA devote their time and energy for the cause and are only reimbursed their expenses.
Please contact us when you come to Kandy again to view our audited financial report to clear any doubts. It is a sad fact, that most dog-owners in Sri Lanka do not have the necessary facilities to keep their dogs away from the road and so it is impossible to be sure about each dog whether it is a stray, a community-dog or an owned dog. The accepted estimate is: 50% of the dogs we see on the road have an owner, though not necessarly a responsible owner, 40% are community-dogs (they have one or more feeders and one or more places, where they are being given shelter), only 10% are really stray-dogs, they are being chased away wherever they go and they are often starving.
The strays are usually difficult to catch because they are running away from humans in fear, but owned and community are easy to catch and therefore almost all dogs the KMC dog-catchers handed over to us, belonged to these two categories and they have a place to return to.
Before October 2002 all those dogs (3000 per year in Kandy alone) were killed, but that did not reduce the street-dog-population because the fast rate of breeding replaces 3000 dogs within few months. If the breeding can be reduced by sterilizing as many female dogs as possible, after few years there would be no ownerless dogs anymore. But unfortunately the KMC has not cooperated in this programme for long, the dog-catchers have stopped catching dogs two and half years ago and no sterilization-programmes have been conducted by the Council during the last three and half years. However, even without the KMC's cooperation we were able to sterilize more than 8000 dogs... if we had not done that and left it to the council, as you suggest, how many thousands of puppies would have been born from those 8000 dogs?
You are telling me, that we have no respect for humans... are you aware, that we had not even one case of human rabies in Kandy since 2002 and that the dog-bite-cases treated in Kandy and Peradeniya are decreasing steadily?
I hope you don't mind, that I will share our correspondence with some other people.

Eva Ruppel, Treasurer of SOFA (here mostly known as Padma)

posted by aljuhara @ 7:37 PM