Help our Animal Hospital Survive Covid-19 Crisis

There are many challenges still remaining since the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. Tourism is still down in Rajasthan, so there are fewer tourists to both help the street animals and support the local economy. We are experiencing more extremes of weather with both the hot season getting hotter and the wet season getting wetter. This situation not only makes the logistics of animal rescue more difficult, but it also makes life so much harder for the street animals.

Let me introduce you to just one animal we have helped recently. Poor Tigs had been running around Ajmer scratching his itchy skin until his hair fell out and he started giving himself wounds.

Mange by itself isn’t life threatening but the wounds caused by incessant itching can be. Infection can set in, and in damp weather maggots can infest the wounds. If left untreated these will kill a dog. Tigs was raw, miserable and with little hope in sight… Until our vehicle was called to rescue him!

At TOLFA, all mange dogs like Tigs are given weekly chemical baths and anti-parasite injections, so slowly the itching lessened, his wounds started healing and the rawness went away.

It took many weeks for us to make sure that every parasite was gone, but Tigs is now parasite free, sterilised and vaccinated against rabies and will soon be off back to his area to live his second chance at life.

Tigs is just one animal we were able to help, but our emergency number receives about 50 calls to help animals like Tigs every single day. It is our aim to help every single animal that needs us. This is all possible due to your support and we cannot thank you enough.

Links:

• Help Us Get A New Rescue Vehicle to Reach More Animals Like Tigs

Despite the challenges of the pandemic, with the terrible illness, travel restrictions and uncertainty, we helped more animals in 2021 than before, with the average number of calls we receive on our rescue line now at 50 a day.

We reached 42% MORE animals in need in 2021 compared to 2020 through hospital admissions and street treatments, with the total number of animals helped by our Rescue & Care Project alone being 13,496.

Based on the data from 2021, 81% of the animals we treat are dogs and puppies, 16% are cows, 2% are cats and 1% are 'other' (usually equines or camels).

We reached 28,908 animals across ALL our projects in 2021 (our other projects are Anti-Rabies & Sterilisation, Rural Animal Health, and Owned Animal Care). This is a phenomenal figure, and we are truly grateful for your support which allows us to do so much.

December and January are the worst months to be a puppy in India. Due to the breeding seasons, they are either around 6 months old and the perfect age to be attacked by distemper virus or canine hepatitis or they are just a few weeks old and starting to venture away from their mama meaning they are more likely to be attacked by other dogs or get hit by a vehicle.

We have seen a lot of distemper and many cases of haemorrhagic gastroenteritis which are both viral, spread like wildfire and have no direct cure other than support such as IV drips, vitamins, and nurturing work to ensure the pups are eating.

During just December and January, we admitted over 500 puppies, and we provided Street Treatments to almost 600 more.

Thank you for your amazing support which helps so many vulnerable and sick animals!

Links:

• Check out our New Website

It has been a tough time for everyone, but we are happy to report that no more TOLFA staff have been sick and, although we are still observing extra safety measures, things have nearly returned to ‘normal’ here in Rajasthan.

In the new year we are even expecting more tourists to return as international flights and visas open up. This will help our local economy and make life easier for the street animals as more cafes and hotels operate, providing the leftover food many animals rely upon.

September and October this year have been our busiest months ever receiving 4,430 emergency calls in those two months alone! We are working harder than ever before to help the animals in need and YOUR SUPPORT is what allows us to do that.

We have also been busy with our Anti Rabies and Sterilisation project – between January and September 2021 we have sterilised almost 1,500 dogs to humanely control the population, and we have vaccinated 1,676 dogs against the deadly rabies disease – protecting people as well as animals.

Thank you once again for supporting TOLFA during these difficult and unpredictable times.

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!