Making Happy Tails for Street Dogs in Rwanda

The last three months have passed by so quickly! Since our last report in April, we have rescued 18 dogs and rehomed 15. We’ve had so many happy tails it’s hard to choose a few to include here -- in the photo above you can see just a few of the successful human-canine matches we've made. A couple of adoption highlights include:

• Bernard, a firm favourite amongst the WAG humans, found a great family. He was transformed under WAG’s care from a scared, defensive guard dog to a sweet, happy, trusting family companion.
• Pili Pili, who was rescued with a severely broken leg which required complex surgery to fix, was adopted by Bony and family — he also has a new canine sister called Masha and they are firm friends. Pili Pili was such a loveable troublemaker at our shelter — we miss him a lot but we don’t miss him climbing out of the dog pen and getting into our kitchen to steal food!

We’ve rescued so many dogs who would have otherwise suffered on the street. We rescued Wolfie, who had been attacked and had large wounds across his head when we found him, and Toby, who had a broken leg which had healed and fused whilst homeless. Another rescue highlight is Shanti, who was rescued while heavily pregnant. As soon as she was safely with us, she gave birth to 7 tiny but healthy puppies! Shanti and family are doing well and they have been generously sponsored by several of our supporters, which will cover all their vaccinations for the next 3 months, food and deworming meds.

Another big piece of news is that we have established our small shelter clinic! We had a fundraiser in May (thank you to everyone who came and those who supported us from afar!) and with the funds raised we have procured the medicines, equipment, and supplies needed to do basic first aid care, vaccinations, sterilisations, and other minor surgeries for our WAG dogs. This is a huge game changer for us as it keeps our costs down for those essential procedures like sterilisations and vaccinations. We have so far done four neuters at our little clinic and have big plans for more!

We have been hard at work preparing for Kigali’s first ever mass sterilisation event, in partnership with Worldwide Veterinary Service. WVS are sending 3 team members to train 12 Rwandan vets on surgical sterilisation, and we will sterilise between 100-120 dogs (and a few cats too!) over the course of the next two weeks. A lot of our time has been spent in wholesale pharmacies sourcing medications and supplies, and preparing our little clinic space. We’ll also test our national dog registration database system, and vaccinate and microchip every dog that we sterilise.

Thank you, as always, for your ongoing support of WAG. We may be small but we have a big impact - and we have big plans! WAG started 10 years ago as a grassroots initiative, and with your support we’re realising our dreams. We are so hopeful that as we grow we will not only help more dogs but start to address the root causes of why dogs are on the street in the first place, through collaborations, education, training, and veterinary care.

Please share this update with any friends, family or colleagues who may be interested in what we do, and thank you once again for your support.

With love from the WAG pack: both humans and dogs

A warm hello from all of us at WAG,

Let's start this update with the biggest, most exciting news of all - we moved!! 

As many of you have seen on our social media, or through our other project report for our ‘WAG on the move!’ GlobalGiving fundraiser page, we officially moved to our new shelter at the beginning of February this year!  We are so excited about the difference already being made in our new home.

This move has meant a HUGE increase in capacity for us – we rescued 18 puppies and 7 adult dogs in February alone, and 4 more adult dogs in March. While we knew the potential to rescue more dogs was there in the new space, being able to say yes to new dogs has been incredible. So many lives changed for the better. One of our rescues, only 2 days after we’d moved into the new shelter, was Soso and her six babies. Soso had given birth outside someone’s gate in Kigali. The home owner had tried to create a shelter for Soso to protect her from the rain before they heard about WAG and contacted us. Soso was desperately thin and her pups were only days old when we picked them up. Now, they are thriving, and will be ready for their forever homes in 4 weeks time! 

As well as doing our regular rescues, we have responded to some emergencies too. One was Gift, who was found unresponsive in the middle of the street. Luckily, a kind community member took Gift off the street and contacted WAG right away. We got Gift to New Vision Veterinary Hospital, and he was diagnosed with canine distemper. We’re seeing a lot more cases of distemper here in Rwanda recently, which is worrying since it is very often fatal for unvaccinated dogs and puppies and is really contagious. Gift is currently undergoing treatment and we’re hoping he makes a full recovery. 

We’ve also had lots of adoptions so far this year - puppies and adult dogs. We rescued mama dog Teddy and her five pups in early February, and 3 of them have already been adopted! And our adult dogs Jim, Merry (you might have read about Jim and Merry in our December update), Ettore, Narame, Bernard, Bella, Romeo and Belize have all gone to new homes in the last three months. 

We have been so grateful for the monthly donations which help support our day-to-day shelter operations. With so many more mouths to feed and rooms to clean, our food and utility costs have increased, as well as our vet bills. Thank you for your continued support! 

In other exciting news, we signed an MOU with New Vision Veterinary Hospital, which allows us discounted services and capacity building and training for WAG staff. We’re super excited to have formalised that partnership with NVVH and we’re so grateful for their support.  

And in our broader work, we are continuing to work with the Government of Rwanda to build a national dog registration database, where all dogs can be registered to help the identification of dogs and vaccination records. This is part of a larger effort to enumerate dogs in Rwanda and learn more about their demographics (vaccine status, etc) in order to eliminate rabies. But it’s also critical to WAG’s work as, more often than not, we are finding dogs who have previously had owners and have either got lost or have been abandoned intentionally. A dog registration database will help us more easily identify dogs’ owners and may help stop owners abandoning their dogs on the street. 

Once again thank you for continuing to support our work and believing in us as we take big steps to expand our capacity and help more dogs. We truly couldn’t do any of this without our dedicated supporters from around the world. Keep an eye out on our social media (@WAGkigali on Instagram and Facebook) for more updates and stories from our new shelter :) 

With gratitude, 

The humans and dogs of WAG