News

We are proud to announce that the amazing animal advocate, Ricky Gervais has become a Patron for Paws2Rescue. He will help us to raise awareness across the world to the plight of the Romanian dogs.

The Paws2Rescue team’s hearts are permanently broken, knowing about the horrific abuse of dogs in the dog meat trade. Last year, in South Korea, 300 dogs were rescued from a dog farm near Seoul. As the dogs waited in cramped cages, others were being slaughtered in front of their eyes.

The dog meat trade in South Korea is sickening, and dogs destined for the dinner plate suffer the most extreme deaths imaginable, including many being boiled alive.

In June 2017, Gem, an 18 month old dog meat trade survivor, will leave South Korea forever, flying to the UK and Heathrow airport. Our team fell in love with Gem when they heard of her sickening start to life (she is only 18 months), and we wanted to help her. She will be our first Jindo dog in the UK, thanks to the wonderful rescuer Nami.

The costs of vaccinating and bringing Gem to the UK are huge, and we will be holding our own fundraising events to help her. If you would like to carry out a fundraising event – from a car boot sale to a bungee jump, please contact us and we can help you with an events pack.

We visit our rescuers and their dogs, we help them with cleaning, or walking or playing with the dogs, we buy them dog food, and strengthen our relationships. We fully assess dogs that are adopted and will travel to the UK or other countries and we feed strays – so many strays. Often, we go alone or with our rescuers as they are called to an emergency for a dog that is seriously injured or abused – (this still occurs at least on a weekly basis, if not more). On some visits, we join our neuter campaigns, we talk with locals, vets and the Romanian national TV. Yet, on every visit, always the low point of our visit, we go to the public shelters.

The local authority paid dog catchers will capture the dogs using dog poles, traumatising the dogs, and bring them to the local public shelter. The dog is then left there. Conditions at public shelters vary: few have kind workers, the cages are kept clean, and the dogs have water and food (even though the food is like cardboard). The public are allowed to visit and adopt a dog, and the dogs are not euthanised. These are the basic conditions that the Romanian law states a stray dog should have.

However, shelters like this are rare to find: most shelters that we have been to are rancid – you can smell them hundreds of yards before your each them – the excrement, and the smell of fear and despair. Workers are hard to find, many do not care about the dogs, and the money allocated by the local authority for the dogs doesn’t always appear to reach the dogs bowls (actually, most don’t have bowls either). Dogs will stay in cramped, dirty, disease ridden cages until they are euthanised. The shelters are supposed to keep the dogs for 14 days, but we have known shelters that kill the dogs within 3 days of arrival. Sadly, the nature of euthanasia is not a kind injection, like the one used in the UK, a range of methods have been used over the past few years – sickening, agonisingly slow and painful deaths, or harsh blows and even injection of illegal substances such as Furidan (even illegal by Romania’s standards).

We visit these shelters to at least take a few dogs out. Do not ask how we choose, because we have no idea, but each time, we do. We have worked with our rescuers to expose many of the worst public shelters, taking TV crews with us, and closing two shelters down last year. We made an arrangement to work with one shelter, to bring food, to improve the dog’s living conditions. Our rescuers in Baia Mare have taken over the running of their public shelter, bringing improved conditions and workers who at least love the dogs. We will help these shelters in neutering the dogs – because they are breeding inside the cages too! Anything that we can physically do to improve the lives of the dogs, we have done, and will do. We continue to speak out for those who have no voice – every day of the year.

Until the government, and each local authorities attitude changes towards the stray dogs, sadly, there is little more that we can do at these public shelters.

To turn back and look into the dogs’ eyes as we walk away and leave them behind breaks our hearts every time, and as long as we live, we will never be able to forget the eyes, and the screaming.

In the Ceausescu era, (the ex-Romanian Communist Party leader who became President of Romania in 1974, ruling until 1989), people’s land and homes were taken away to pay off Romania’s debts, apartment buildings being built for them to live in instead. Anyone that owned dogs and cats had to turn them loose on the streets, they were not allowed to take them in the apartments. Most were not neutered and people were left powerless as the animals starting breeding on the streets.

Years on, and the dogs started running in packs and scaring people (most were harmless). So most people over the years started fearing and hating the dogs. This may explain why still today we see such violent cases of extreme abuse to dogs.

The mayor of the country’s capital Bucharest stated that the quickest way of getting rid of the strays was mass slaughter, and soon enough other cities followed in suit. For over 20 years the dogs were chased, captured and killed in numerous cruel and painful ways. They have been shot, poisoned, hung, burnt to death or crammed into small kennels to die of hunger and thirst – as they still are today.

The situation for dogs worsened once again in a horrific manner in the autumn of 2013, when stray dogs were accused of killing a boy in Bucharest (even though it has subsequently been discovered that this was not the case). The Romanian president and the press stirred up the hatred towards the animals, and succeeded in pushing through a Law allowing the killing of all dogs after 14 days of their capture, unless the local mayor has the funds to allow the dogs a longer stay at the public shelter.

Despite protests across Europe, petitions, appeals and demonstrations, the Law was accepted anyway. Romania took a huge step back in time. The streets became a frenzy of dogcatchers, and the images from Romania of abuse emerging was so sickening that Paws2Rescue was born to help the dogs.

Today, dogs are still killed using sickening cruel methods, and the Law encourages the mass catching and killings of dogs at public shelters. The President was supported in his campaign by uneducated people, who blindly believed his promises of cleaning the streets through the killings. Stray dogs started to become a big money earner for the government and dog catchers, paid to cleanse the streets.

It is a globally known fact is that the stray dog problem cannot be solved by killing dogs, but only with neutering and by the education of the nation. Yet the slaughter goes on in Romania, against all these facts.

Public shelters are overflowing with dogs, dying in inhumane conditions of starvation, disease, being eaten by other dogs, mistreated and abused by the workers and then killed painfully using inhumane methods.

Today, life as a stray in Romania is truly hell on earth – and the land remains stained red with the blood of the continual murder of innocent puppies and dogs.

Portos was found in 2016, after news of a pup that had been seriously attacked circulated on social media. Whilst others took photos and walked past, our rescuer went to save him. He was allegedly attacked by a human with an axe, but we will never know. The photo above is how he was found.

He was taken to the trauma vet, and under-went months of surgery and skin grafts and we visited him there:

Our supporters kind donations paid for this little boy’s vet treatment, surgery and stay. Finally, towards the end of 2016, Portos was finally ready. He had been adopted, and he came to the UK to meet his forever family – in time for Christmas too!:

A huge thank you to Nia, Will, Keith and Marcus for their black out bungee jump on 11th March 2017.

They raised over £1,000 – thank you to everyone who donated! – the bungee jump team have chosen to fund a neuter campaign with the money raised.

If you would like to raise money to help our work in Romania, please email us so that we can help you with a preparation pack.

We’d like to send a big thank you to Peter Egan, Ricky Gervais and author Angela Humphrey for their support of our 2017 Paws2Neuter campaigns in Romania.

We are following up our 2016 neuter campaigns with many more in 2017. Our first two campaigns of 2017 are in March, and being held at Tom Vet in Constanta Romania. We have already neutered 60 dogs, and a further 60 will be neutered during the campaign in 10-12 March.

Following these, we are preparing to fundraise for further campaigns across Romania.

Spay and neuter campaigns are a vital part of our work; without these the number of puppies being born is astronomical. By targeting the root cause, we can significantly reduce the number of puppies born each year. By neutering just one female dog we can prevent 67,000 puppies being born over a period of six years.

Please support our vital work in helping to control the stray dog and cat population.

Paws2Rescue are joining Highland Fling on the evening of Saturday 11th March 2017 to bungee on Europe’s only Black Out bungee jump.

Our Scottish team are raising awareness to the plight of the Romanian stray dog abuse, and desperately needed funds to help our work out there.

If you want to join us, why not email us, and come join our Highland Fling? Minimum sponsorship you need to raise is £125.

If you cannot jump, why not support our local team member Nia, as she braves her fear of heights: https://www.youcaring.com/paws2rescue-751411

Libby, aged 12 is going back to Romania next week to feed as many stray dogs as she can find in the awful sub-zero temperatures out there. To help raise donations, she is spending 48 hours in a cage: she wants to see how it feels for those poor dogs locked up in cages all day long in awful shelters. You can support Libby, an inspiration to so many, by donating to her You Caring appeal.

Libby has been going to Romania with Paws2Rescue and her mum for three years during some of her school holidays. She is a natural with all the dogs, and the dogs love having the energy of a child to play all day with them. On every visit, there is never a stray that we see that does not receive a meal from Libby. Invariably journeys with her out there take quite some time.

Friday night Libby entered her cage, quite chirpy – but we know that she will be feeling the boredom of the dogs as soon as her phone battery runs out! Please support Libby and help her to feed the dogs: https://www.youcaring.com/paws2rescue-755178