Help our Animal Hospital Survive Covid-19 Crisis

Since our last report in March the Coronavirus situation exploded in India and has had a devastating affect on the country. Many hundreds of thousands of people have suffered from the virus and there have been a tragic number of deaths. The infrastructure crumbled and many had to suffer alone, unable to find hospital beds or basic medical supplies.

The knock-on effect for TOLFA was also desperate. We had to bring back emergency working measures, reduce our services and make sure we could provide the best care possible for our staff that became infected with Covid-19. So far 25% of our staff have had the virus. Fortunately, none of them required hospitalisation.

We have struggled again with sourcing the medicines and medical consumables (syringes, IV equipment etc) we need as many of these were diverted to human hospitals. Fortunately now all of our staff have received their first vaccinations, as they are recognised as frontline workers and the numbers of cases in our area is slowly going down. However there is expected to be a third wave coming in a couple of months, so we have to recognise that that this nightmare won’t be over any time soon.

This is why your support of this project, to keep our animal hospital going during this worldwide pandemic, is so vitally important.

The animals are still out there, and we still receive 40-50 calls for rescue every day. Our staff have been brilliant throughout all of this – the very epitome of ‘teamwork’, but they cannot do it with you giving your support so we can pay for the food and medicines the animals need to recover.

Please find with this report some photos of our staff and some animals recently helped at TOLFA

Thank you for everything you have done, and please continue supporting us!

Local restrictions may have lifted here in Rajasthan, but India is still coping with the pandemic and the effect this has had on the economy and international travel. Foreigners are still not allowed to enter the country so our local town of Pushkar has been deprived of the usual inundation of tourists which populate the many hotels, cafes, and restaurants. The knock-on effect for the street animals is the lack of leftovers, either inadvertently scavenged or offered kindly by both locals and visitors. We have also missed the donations and support from passing tourists, who often come out to TOLFA after hearing about us in the town.

Despite this we are still dedicated to the rescue and care of the street animals and in February we reached a total of 3,069 individual animals through all our projects. Of these we rescued 469 animals from pain and injury, and performed sterilisation operations on 116 dogs.

There was also the annual Urs festival in nearby Ajmer, during which time we kept almost 300 dogs at TOLFA as a public safety measure, while also checking the health of those dogs, administering rabies vaccinations, and sterilising them as required. This festival was the original reason TOLFA began 15 years ago, as the local municipality’s previous solution to clearing the area of street dogs (the festival attracts hundreds of thousands of worshippers) was to take them and leave them to die, tied up, in the desert.

What a change TOLFA has seen since those days, with many more street dogs having attentive care-givers who feed and watch out for them, calling TOLFA as soon as they become unwell.

Included are some photos of our work and animals.

Thank you very much for your continued and vital support!

Dear Supporter,

Through this special Covid-19 Crisis Appeal you have helped us raise almost £11,500 - a simply fantastic amount. 

Our Rescue Team have been as busy as ever and since the last report we have attended to 4,490 rescue calls about animals in need of our help. Our team are now adept at providing street treatments to those animals who do not need to come to the hospital.

We are grateful to a network of street animal care-takers who have shown themselves to be real heroes of lockdown, and make our job that bit easier by caring for the animals living in their communities.

Although COVID-19 is still a major problem in India we feel blessed that none of our staff or their direct families have been affected by it. Sadly, there are a number of people affiliated with TOLFA such as supporters and government contacts who have had the virus and of course we wish them all speedy recoveries and the best of future health.

Our staff continue to take precautionary measures such as wearing masks, social distancing and hand sanitization. We cannot commend highly enough our team's dedication and hard work during this challenging time.

We have seen many dogs with maggot wounds in the last few months and we are now seeing an increase in sick, injured, and orphaned puppies as ‘puppy season’ begins. We have also rescued 2 abandoned camels recently – victims of the pandemic’s effect of the local tourism industry. It is hard to say what the long-term outcome will be for working animals such as these.

Whatever happens we will still be here for the animals who need us – thank you for helping us do so much!

With regards,

Links:

• TOLFA's Latest Newsletter

This is the first report for this special Covid-19 Crisis Appeal.

Your support has been incredible and has enabled us, despite working under one of the strictest lockdowns in the world, to attend 94.8% of the 3,495 animal rescue calls we received between March and June.

It has been tough, for us, and for the animals. Due to the closure of shops and restaurants, and most tourists in the region returning to their home countries, the street animals have been struggling to find enough food to survive. We saw a sharp rise in dogs admitted with bite wounds from other dogs as they competed over the dwindling resources. We used some of this appeal’s donations to set up a street feeding programme for dogs and cows worst affected by the lockdown. You can watch a short video about our street feeding on the attached link.

Cases of COVID-19 are still rising in India. There is a traffic light system in place and our nearest city of Ajmer is a red zone with some areas having been cut off and made no-go zones.  We continue to enforce staff rules about mask wearing, hand washing, social distancing.

I attach some photos of just some of the 3,000+ animals we have helped during the crisis. Without your support we could not have reached them all.

Thank you for supporting TOLFA!

Links:

• TOLFA's Street Feeding Programme in Action