Saving street animals
How an eye-opening holiday moved Kim Cooling to set up a sanctuary in Sri Lanka, giving a happier future to the country’s stray dogs and cats
Awagging tail is one of the happiest sights Kim Cooling hopes to see every time she wanders around Animal SOS Sri Lanka. A sprawling four-acre site, around 1,600 dogs and 62 cats call this sanctuary their home, and Kim loves to see the animals happily exploring the place or running around together having fun. After all, life for every single animal in this sanctuary was once incredibly different, having all come from desperate times, living in one of the toughest places on the planet to be a dog or a cat.
The charity began when Kim first visited Sri Lanka on holiday and was horrified by the conditions of the hungry, maltreated animals she saw on the streets. “I was so upset by it, I spent the whole trip trying to feed as many animals as I could,” says Kim.
With a staggering three million street dogs in Sri Lanka and little neutering in place to stop the problem getting worse, it’s a massive issue. Fear of rabies means animals and people rarely live in harmony and, at the time of Kim’s first visit, there was also a ruling in place sadly encouraging the slaughter of stray animals. But when a few years after her visit she learned this ruling had been reversed, Kim felt perhaps out of what had seemed a totally hopeless situation, there was now a bit of light that might allow her to do something to help.
So she returned to Sri Lanka with a few friends and managed to raise funds to buy a site in the country’s Southern Province, registered as a charity and started taking in a few strays. The aim then – as now – was to help those street animals most in need: those struggling to find food, facing illness or injured by cruelty or the chaotic traffic on the local roads.
Once the animals come into the sanctuary, they get the proper vet care and treatment they need as well as being neutered and vaccinated. For those that were rescued from safe enough areas where there’s shelter and food available they’ll be returned or, in some cases,
rehomed. However, for most animals, they’ll find their happy forever home in the grassy rural sanctuary of Animal SOS where they’ll be fed and looked after, surrounded by friends on four legs (and two) for the rest of their lives.
For dogs that come in with serious disabilities, they’re given extra help including mobility carts that can help them get around like all the other dogs and Saturday morning visits to the beach for hydrotherapy. “The dogs get little life jackets as we help them use the sea water to get the muscles in their legs working,” says Kim. “We’ve had cases where dogs we thought would never walk again have been able to do just that, which is amazing.”
As well as the rescue work, Animal SOS also spends time travelling to local communities trying to tackle some of the issues that lead to so many desperate animals coming through its doors in the first place. This includes holding regular sessions inviting pet owners to get their animals neutered – a practice that currently isn’t widespread in the country – and has led to a culture of people regularly dumping their animal’s litters.
The charity also provide free rabies vaccinations to dogs around the area, helping diminish the threat that has been known to make people sometimes aggressive towards dogs.
And, not content with feeding countless charges of their own at the sanctuary, every day the staff of Animal SOS Sri Lanka also go out in a tuk-tuk with buckets of food to feed all the hungry strays in the area which wait, tails patiently wagging, for dinner time.
As well making an obvious difference to the lives of Sri Lanka’s animals, the charity has the added benefit of helping local people. Based in a village housing many survivors of the 2004 tsunami, the sanctuary now employs around 40 local staff, most of whom have suffered terrible losses.
At the charity, though, they have a chance to improve life for their family, as well as forming friendships with animals that have also known great hardships themselves. No wonder, then, that many of the staff end up taking one or two dogs home.
But with so many animals to look after and bills amounting to £40,000 a month, Kim says it can be hard to cope – especially after recent torrential rain left their sanctuary flooded.
“It can be so hard sometimes, and there are animals we’re just sadly too full to help but every time I see an animal that, without the charity would not have survived, I know it’s worth it,” says Kim.
“We’ve had animals wake up from comas and dogs which were once skin and bone turn into these healthy, hairy dogs and I know if the clock turned back, I’d definitely do this all again.”
■ If you’d like to help support the charity, send a cheque payable to ‘Animal SOS
Sri Lanka’ to: 12 Cheyne Avenue, South Woodford, London E18 2DR or visit www.animalsos-sl.com
‘We’ve had cases where dogs we thought would never walk again have been able to do just that, which is amazing’