Courtesy AAPN/SOFA: SOFA KANDY news letter

Courtesy AAPN/SOFA Kandy news letter

For a long while again we were completely immersed in our day to day problems with too many dogs around and could not find a free minute to let you know what's going on in Kandy. Our main problem, causing much pain to many pet-owners too, not only in Kandy, but everywhere in Sri Lanka, for the first few months of this year was the distemper-epidemic. We lost many young lives and some adults too and spent huge amounts on drugs to save those, which did get early signs, to prevent a full-fledged out-break. Probably the heat during this year's dry season has made things worse...!?? Whatever the reason may be, fact is, that we have never witnessed such a wide-spread and long-lasting distemper-epidemic before, we remember occasional localized out-breaks, which were contained within a couple of weeks. What happened this year, sweeping down from the north to the south of Sri Lanka was a wild-fire of the deadly virus, affecting not only the unvaccinated strays and the pets of the poor, but quite a few vaccinated dogs caught it too, which makes us think about the cool-chain, which is essential for vaccines to work. Vets call it vaccine-failure and leave it at that, but it may have something to do with irresponsible importers, pharmacies and clinics. To add to the pain of the infected dogs and their owners, vets in Sri Lanka usually show no compassion when the disease has come to a stage, in which it is hundred percent certain, that there is no recovery possible: misunderstood Buddhist teachings prevent them from relieving the animals of the horrific last stage of the disease.

At this moment our shelter and foster-homes are free from distemper, but in Kandy and in the villages too we still notice infected animals, so we are also not yet on the safe side, because every time we catch a dog to get her sterilized, a possibility exists, that she may incubate the virus and have a break-out after surgery due to the temporary weakness of the immune-system. Of course we keep these dogs separate from the shelter-dogs, but air-born viruses are hard to control.

Right now 46 puppies at the shelter live a happy life alongside 58 adult animals... hopefully some of the people, who have lost their dogs, will adopt some pups from us. As the location of the shelter is the earlier Municipal dog-pound and located right next to to the Municipal garbage-dump, it is difficult to attract people there to select a pup, so whenever time permits, we offer home-delivery too.

Though recent epidemic has restricted us a bit, we were able to go ahead with our sterilization-work, wherever and whenever it was safe. The total number of dogs and cats spayed/neutered is approximately 17600 now, out of which the great majority is female dogs.

As those who have watched our work for a while may remember, we still have a court-case going on with the Kandy Municipal Council over the killing of dogs. After dragging on the case for a long time, the KMC has recently amended its answer to our appeal. Actually it was not an amendment, but a completely new stand, even claiming the pound back, which was given to us to use it as a transit-home, and asking for damages... completely absurd because the new project going on, planning to transform the garbage-dump into a biogas-plant, involves not only the KMC, but also the University and the ministry or Environment, and these two institutions have already reassured us, that we can stay in those premises until a suitable place for re-location the shelter has been found and re-location-funds have been made available.

The Spay-Program of the Health-Ministry in the Central Province has come to a halt for the last ten months because of an audit-inquiry. A new tender has to be selected, but up to now the program was not re-started. A suggestion of KACPAW to work with vets who are paid a monthly salary rather than paying private vets a certain sum per animal, has been proposed to the Health-Ministry. We agree that this might improve the quality of the surgeries if they are not performed in a big hurry to make quick money; on the other hand the government-sector in all its activities suffers of poor performance because without incentives only a few dedicated individuals work efficiently. Therefore we did not get actively involved in any kind of promotion, but we definitely notice the increase of strays and are unable to catch and sterilize all of them, not only because of financial constraints, but also due to lack of man-power. So we hope the Central Province will get its spay-program running again. Hopefully this time without killing half of the animals in the process.

What happens in the absence of regular spay-clinics we saw in Gampola last week: the Urban Council collected strays from the road and was about to kill them. Fortunately we were informed in time and were able to rescue the dogs this time. During negotiations with the Mayor we were asked to start regular spay-clinics at Gampola again and we promised to do so, even though we still have to find the funds for it.

Therefore please consider to help us with funding more field-clinics in Kandy and Gampola and in all these tiny remote villages, where people have no access to vet-clinics unless we bring the vets to them.

A big thank you to everyone, who has donated so far to make our work possible, and another big thank you to those, who will support us in future, so that we can always say "yes" when someone asks us for a spay-field-clinic, when someone calls us because of puppies dumped on the road or when we receive an emergency-call when a dog got hit by a vehicle.

For more back-ground-information about our work please see http://www.sofakandy.org