Helping at an animal shelter

Christmas and boxing day could not have been better spent than this.
While there was no real sign of the Christmas spirit Kaya and I spent a day here at the animal shelter in Udaipur. Much more rewarding than the forts..

So there are many many street animals in India but not many shelters. While Kaya and I both believe the human needs crisis needs to be solved more urgently it doesn't take away from the great initiative. They take wounded street animals in and cure them, then they release them back into the wild. In some cases (blindness or loss of backlegs) they do adopt them and keep them there as they wouldn't survive back in the wild.

They also adopt donkeys that have been used cruelly for labour, so we saw many ghastly sights of twisted legs and horrible wounds which is really sad. Donkeys are used here to carry big bags of rocks, way heavier than they are able of coping with and they will tie their front leg to their back leg to decrease speed, with grim results. Luckily they got to stay in this nice enclosure with the cows.

The cows usually come from the milk industry as when they no longer can produce milk the industry tosses them onto the street, the cows are often too weak to survive on their own after this. The shelter also has many male baby cows that either get killed or tossed for the reason that they can't produce milk. Again, quite sad and this is one we can't even deny happens in the west! Also their are a lot of "wild" cows in India that live on the street. With all the pollution and littering here the poor things end up consuming so much plastic and as a result of this their stomach fills with it, creating a barrier that won't let any actual food and nutrients pass through. They got weirdly bloated and will die soon if nothing is done, again the shelter will try to perform a surgery but to be fair they will just go back on the street again and the same will happen.

All in all another eye opening experience that was very rewarding. We spent two days there helping out and gave some donations.Read more