Help Us Scratch those Fleas!

Another review of the last 3 months at SARA. I am so sorry we are late in sending out the quarterly newsletter. Your author is not coping well with the heat!

We are delighted to announce that Sunshine Animal Refuge Agadir has been registered with the Moroccan authorities as a charitable association. While we have been operating as a project of Association Le Coeur sur la Patte, it is great for us to at last have our own identification and our specific mission of caring for all the animals in our refuges.

You may have noticed a change in our website recently. We have been lucky to have the help of a lovely volunteer Isabelle, to bring our marketing and social media strategy up to the minute. We hope you like the new look.

This month we have been approached by International Animal Welfare and Protection Coalition (IAWPC) to help in their efforts to end the inhumane shooting and poisoning of dogs in Morocco. IWAC want to encourage signatures on a petition to keep the momentum towards humane treatment of street dogs Morocco. If you would like to join the many thousands of voices asking for change, you can read and sign the petition here: https://support.soidog.org/content/help-stop-inhumane-abuse-dogs-morocco

This year Eid came in late June, a time of celebration for families all across the Muslim world. It does bring its difficulties for us as many staff want to take time off to celebrate at home. We are truly grateful for the staff who stayed at the Refuges to care for the animals.

We are making slow but sustained progress on the enlargements at both the Farm and Shems Refuges. We are so grateful to everyone who has donated specifically for this work, and we hope to finish the work at Shems very soon.

During the last few months we have welcomed well over 30 animals to the refuges.  

A dozen animals (dogs and cats) have found their forever homes in the last three months. We are so happy to see them all settling into their new lives.

In the last quarter we neutered 45 dogs and 190 cats. This brings our total up to 90 dogs and 380 cats so far this year. Thanks to Tierbotschafter for their unfailing and invaluable support for this work.

Hallo once again and welcome to our latest quarterly newsletter. It has been a busy few months with lots of visitors, puppies and weather! This month we have had torrential rain, for day after day and night after night, followed immediately by heat in the 40’s.

At the beginning of January, we were approached by some people living near Tifnit a small coastal village just south of Agadir, asking for help with the street animals left behind after the village was demolished. We are providing food for them and will see what other help is required in the longer term.

We finally got permission to start building our new enclosures at the Shems Refuge. At last, we can go ahead with our plans to expand and improve Shems and we can give up the tenancy at Clebs Refuge. This will mean better facilities for the animals and staff at the refuge and save us a lot of time and money in caring for the dogs and managing and supplying the refuge.

We hosted a visit from Jennifer Skiff with a team of photographers from We are Wildlife. We are Wildlife is a non-profit organisation dedicated to empowering conservation projects across the globe.   Our campaign is a departure from their usual projects, and we are very grateful for their involvement. Together we are working on the bigger picture to improve animal welfare in Morocco. We hope that we will soon have a targeted campaign informing both Moroccan citizens and the world about the progress that is being made, what still needs to happen and raising awareness of animal welfare rights in the kingdom. We know that we have a long way to go, but we can feel the tide changing and so we keep our faith and keep working.

At the end of February, we were involved in getting two dogs ready to be flown to their new homes by private jet. This was a project organised by YouTuber Zac Alsop and his team. You can see the video here.

We have a had a huge intake of puppies over the last couple of months and unfortunately with the puppies came Parvovirus. Despite our best efforts and many vet visits, we lost 10 puppies to this horrible disease.

During the last three months 14 dogs and 3 cats were adopted and are now living happily in their forever homes. We also vaccinated and neutered 188 cats from the Agadir streets and 40 dogs.

And finally, our building project on the extension to the Farm Refuge is progressing slowly. For now, we can only erect temporary structures, so our clever team have devised a way of using mountable panels to create safe enclosures for dogs. The dogs will all have access to a large play area as well as being safe from the extremes of weather that we are experiencing.

Thank you for reading this far and for your support. We are often thanked by our donors for the work we do, but really every one of you who supports us is making a difference to the street and working animals in Morocco. Every penny that is donated is valued and goes towards caring for the animals both in our refuges and on the streets.

Thank you from the bottom of our hearts

Hazel and the team at SARA