Events sponsored by two different charities in Europe which funded almost 300 spays, including field captures over a total of five working days. The events were a testament to the amazing place we’ve built here, with a collaboration that we rarely have the privilege of seeing in all my years of animal rescue:
The priest spoke in church about spaying and neutering, for the first time ever, promoted us on his groups.
The mayor stepped up and sent local police with the team to help locate hotspots and difficult cases.
The County Council sent people on the field team for capture, and also helped do some appointments, redirecting people our way; they also helped with returning the street strays the next day, after we housed them for recovery.
The Penitentiary collaborated and asked for help to spay 5 dogs helped by Big Hearts Society through their inmate dog therapy project.
Anda and Alina Murgu (Paws2Rescue qualified vet) of Kind Souls Association handled scheduling and they donated flea and tick spot-ons for the strays; they also took home the two pups from the canal and the kittens whose mom died, for bottle feeding and hand rearing. Irina and her team worked extremely hard, with two vets capturing dogs from the field; the campaign team handled their usual task load that was augmented by so, so many medical cases too.
We also had Romanian, Colombian and French volunteers.
From a medical standpoint, we had a lot of cases. We had to resuscitate a dog who had a sudden collapse post-op. She then spent the day with us on oxygen, on monitoring, and left the next day, after overnight monitoring, perky and happy. She had hyperglycemia. We had several other borderline cases, some bradycardic dogs, some with other comorbidities like heartworm and heart disease, some with respiratory involvement, and even some with dental issues.
As mentioned above, while on the field, the vets heard some weak sounds from a canal and discovered a huge pile of dead, decomposed pelts of puppies who had fallen in over a long period of time in a canal, down at the former agricultural co-op. To their sheer horror, there were two still alive in there. We got them out from the literal hellhole and one was beyond weak and dehydrated. We managed to do fluid resuscitation on both, and they left in better shape to Alina’s for follow-up care.
We also had several consults that came in, one an urgent case with a cat chased by dogs, severely pregnant, who was unable to give birth. When Irina went in, we discovered she had indeed been bitten and had perforations all along her abdomen and uterus, and the babies had died. Sadly, another vet saw her for an ultrasound and…..sent her to us. We managed to perform an emergency hysterectomy and she went back to the clinic in Bucharest for follow up, as her perforations were very serious, despite the commendable job Irina did fixing them.
We are really truly proud and grateful to everyone who participated and worked so hard throughout the campaigns.
We even became a research-friendly place. Last year at our Autumn spay campaign we even had an international researcher team (Romania, Algeria, Thailand and Colombia) taking samples and performing on site e-nose leishmaniasis testing for the dogs, and as with the previous spay campaigns, we had a doctoral student specialized in parasitology taking samples from the dogs and cats.
A special thanks to our amazing Dr Mada Lixandru for managing the campaigns and the Medical Centre.
