Posted on August 22, 2016 by Serbian Animals Voice (SAV)
I was in a distant country, in South America. I wanted to visit friends.
The supermarket, where this photo was taken, was a great one and had everything to sell!
Suddenly my eye falls on this chamber of horrors. Department “meat”! It was not all as neat as in the picture when I saw the heads.
One was perched, one other tipped down, the third one was behind and not be seen.
Altogether there were five heads.
I stay in front of the glass and look in.
Motionless, I cannot believe it! The butcher comes and asks what I want. A photo, I say, can I take pictures of the pig heads? Of course, he said, and begins to arrange the heads. The image must be “beautiful”, he says. He tries, which head to the right, which left.
The chunks of meat disturb a bit, he says, they are not “beautiful” and make the picture bad. Gradually other people gather around me, they like the idea of taking pictures, they smile and make comments.
The cruel sight of the dead, still bleeding heads of creatures does not seem to touch them.
A few years ago this would be inconceivable. Today the farm industry no longer needs to protect the corpse consumers, because it knows: the apathy of modern man is secure.
Suddenly, the security personnel appear. “Photography is prohibited”, they say, and they want to immediately deleting the picture.
I save myself and my picture with great effort, and leave the supermarket.
Photographing murder victim has been banned, but its murder does not!
That is the prevailing morality of a society which every day fed by the suffering and the blood of animals.
A society that lives on the edge of the moral minimum.
Tomorrow an Animals Asia rescue team will head to Nam Dinh province to rescue the female bear. She was originally bought by the current owner’s father who has now passed away. His son – having learnt of the legal requirement to register bears – is keen to do the right thing and voluntarily hand over the bear.
While the illegality of the bear bile industry means that owners will routinely deny extracting bear bile, it’s believed that in this case, the bear has not suffered bile extractions.
However with bile farms still operating and with a market for bear parts for use in traditional medicine, the rescuers are thankful for the voluntary handover and keen for it to take part as soon as possible.
The bear will be given an anesthetic ahead of a transfer to a transport cage before being moved to Animals Asia’s Vietnam Bear Rescue Centre almost 200kms away.
The rescue is going ahead following liaison with the local Forestry and assistance from local charity ENV.
Tuan Bendixsen Animals Asia’s Vietnam Director said:
“At seven years old this is still a young bear and one that can enjoy a full life in the future. However, there is always a physical price to pay for these bears when they have suffered a lack of space, poor diet and inexpert care. Our vets will carry out a health check as part of the rescue to ensure Annemarie is safe to travel – and she’ll enjoy ongoing rehabilitation and vet care back at our sanctuary.”
It’s likely that this rescue can be completed inside a single day with the bear entering sanctuary quarantine the same day.
Animals Asia has rescued nearly 600 bears – the vast majority from the bear bile industry. Annemarie will be the 150th bear currently being cared for at the Vietnam sanctuary.
Around 1,200 bears are still caged in Vietnam by the bear bile industry with over 10,000 more in China.
Posted on August 5, 2016 by Serbian Animals Voice (SAV)
SAV message – we have known for a few months that Danica was ‘unwell’ – but nothing more really. Yesterday (4/8) she e mailed us with the terrible news about her situation and the fact that Jasna is having to take on all the responsibility for the shelter and its occupants. Jasna is unwell herself as you can read in the following message from her.
How typical is this ? – hunters and animal abusers get away scott free, and go on abusing and killing, whilst someone like Danica, who gives up everything to save and rescue cats from the street; is now struck down by such a terrible condition. There is no justice in this world.
I have been thinking overnight how to do a current situation report on shelter Felix; but now Jasna has written today and she basically says everything that needs to be known about the shelter and the current situation.
It has been suggested by some today that the shelter has an urgent meeting with the Municipality, because it is officially the law duty of Subotica city to care about homeless cats too. Unlike all stray animal issues in Serbia, we expect no positive results; municipalities do not care about stray animals; which is why we have argued before that it is essential that all Serbian welfare groups work together and put their name to an official letter to the government and municipalities; reminding of their lawful obligations to get animals protected. Sadly, experience shows that people will not forever keep funding something which the municipalities have a legal responsibility for, but whom just ignore the situation. When people see something positive being done by the municipalities, people will support it; but they are not going to support a situation where the official people with responsibility continue to turn a blind eye, leaving everyone else to pick up the pieces.
Danica, Jasna and Felix shelter have a special place in our hearts. You can use the search box on this site (top right) and just type in ‘Felix’ or ‘Fellix shelter’ to see all the pictures and posts we have given to this wonderful team over the years. Sadly now, things have reached a real crisis, and we call on the municipality to just for once accept its responsibilities and support this shelter with both money and food for the animals; something it has never done in the past, although legally obliged to.
We send Danica and Jasna our love and we know that readers will help and support them in whatever way that they can. They need help now more than ever !!
Subotica City now has a new mayor (one of SNS, Vuchic political party). His name is Mr. Bogdan Laban and his mayoral e mail address is as follows. mayor@subotica.rs
We hope that people will now e mail the Mayor and remind him of his responsibilities – see much more about this Criminal Code and the municipalities legal requirements under the Veterinary Law at https://serbiananimalsvoice.com/about-serbian-animals/
We are not doing a sample letter, in this case it is down to individuals to write – and urgently;
GROUPS LIKE FELIX NEED HELP MORE THAN EVER NOW – IT IS A CRISIS SITUATION FOR THE CATS AND THE PEOPLE THAT OPERATE THERE. HELP JASNA AND DANICA – DID DEEP PLEASE AND GIVE ANYTING YOU CAN – SEE THE BLOG LINK AT THE START AS FOLLOWS. They need a helping hand and they need it now !
Please crosspost to the moon and back – to all the big major animal welfare groups and organisations who may be able to help. Don’t leave it; do it NOW.
This is an important announcement, please read and spread the word!
Sharing bad news and talking about sensitive, difficult topics is never easy and that’s why I’ve been delaying writing this post for as long as I could, but now I feel it’s high time to just come clean about what’s been happening at the shelter behind the scenes since December of 2014. However, I need to emphasize that back then no one could possibly foresee how the situation would evolve, nor be able to predict the ultimate outcome. Danica suffered a significant stroke that affected the left half of her body and it rendered her immobile and bed ridden at the beginning of December the year before last. As she had always lived alone here with the cats, a couple of us (her helpers and friends) rushed to her aid, not only to help her but also to keep the shelter going. Doctors were optimistic at that point and we all hoped she would be able to recover enough to take care of the kitties again in a few months, albeit with some help and a worker or two.
Unfortunately, that was not the case; she had spent months in two rehabilitation clinics (one of which is the best in Serbia) to no avail – she made very little, if any progress. Last summer she began talking about going to a nursing home where she would have trained professional staff 24/7, as she was still bed bound and relied on assistance with almost all of the activities of daily living. After months of what seemed to be an unending struggle with bureaucracy, she finally went into a nursing home where she has skilled nursing, three meals a day, physical therapy and lifelong care. Since her stroke, let alone her departure, a three digit number of cats and the shelter’s existence itself have been left hanging by a thread in midair. The biggest problem we were facing was that the cats wouldn’t be able to live alone here just being fed and checked on every day, no matter how independent and self sufficient they might appear. Someone needed to step in and move to the shelter in this little village in the middle of nowhere in order to take care of the cats, but Danica had never made any arrangements for them in case anything bad happened to her. Long story short, as I’ve been helping Danica for years, running her website, her blog and some of her social media accounts from a distance of 200 km, guess who was supposed to jump in when something goes seriously wrong?
So I came here more than a year and a half ago, together with my 13 cats and a pooch (now two of them) but I didn’t come to stay; I really hoped that Danica would recover and I’d be back home by autumn. Wishful thinking… And a huge mistake. Anyway, although I wasn’t exactly eager to keep on living here, I never really had much of a choice – if a private animal shelter closes down, the city council is supposed to find some solution and take over the animals. As the city pound in Subotica has a capacity of 150 animals, and right now only dogs, the Felix kitties wouldn’t have anywhere to go. I couldn’t stand the thought of them being cast back out into the streets to suffer yet again or being put down.
Cat Shelter Felix was registered in 2011 and got a certificate from a veterinary inspection showing that it complies to the new Rulebook of Conditions that animal shelters need to fulfill in 2014, but it doesn’t change a thing. Even though Serbia has a no kill policy, I didn’t even dare to imagine what would’ve happened to the Felix cats had I not arrived at the shelter when I did.
Danica was certainly doing her best to take care of the cats, but with her health declining, things had been spiraling out of control over quite a long time. Only one cat was tested for FIV and FeLV; many cats that were periodically showing symptoms of some mysterious diseases had never had an accurate diagnosis; the house was a total disaster, with leaking ceilings from which chunks of mortar were falling, cracked flooring and old wooden windows that couldn’t seal properly.
There was a huge pile of rubbish behind the garage; the outdoor fence with the posts that had been deteriorating and crumbling for ages was still standing by pure miracle. And last but not least, the future of all of the shelter cats was still rather uncertain as this property didn’t belong to Danica but to a friend of hers who could try and get the cats evicted at any given time. Just great. As always, first things come first – Danica sold her apartment in Novi Sad and bought this 2200 square meter property together with the house of 130 square meters and the cats’ rooms for 15.000 euros, so the cats were finally safe no matter what.
The roof of the house was repaired last summer, the rotten wooden platforms and boards in the yard were replaced and the new ladders were made. As most of the cats which had been shedding abundantly for months were not able to replenish their fur because of a low quality diet, we began feeding them better food and the change was more than obvious; in just a couple of weeks’ time the kitties’ fur became shiny and smooth. We paid for around thirty trips with a garbage truck filled with trash (old broken wooden beams and boards, rags, worthless pieces of cloth, empty tins, wet cardboard boxes and so on) that went back and forth to a city dumpster.
Around 50 cats have been tested for FIV and FeLV so far and those who are FIV positive – luckily, none of them is FeLV positive – have been receiving interferon regularly since last year. Many of the cats that Danica took into the shelter in 2010 when she moved in are quite old and either chronically ill now or in delicate health; the same applies to Etela’s cats which survived the fire that ravaged her shelter in 2011 and ended up here. Whenever any of them gets sick, the treatment lasts for weeks, the costs are tremendous and despite all of our efforts, they almost never bounce back. Moreover, we’ve taken in at least 20 new cats since last autumn as apparently no one else living nearby was able to help (they wished they could but they had three or four cats already). Although we’ve been fighting numerous battles at the same time for months and accepting new cats was the last thing we needed, we simply couldn’t turn our backs on them, pretend they never existed and leave them to their fate. Someone had to save them and that someone is always hard to find – if not us, then who? This leads me to my next point, our current situation. With Danica out of the picture and only one friend who lives in Subotica and is worth her weight in gold, I’m stuck at the shelter now with more than 140 cats in total and two dogs.
It should probably be mentioned that I still bear the consequences of a serious auto immune disease I had and therefore walk with crutches, but no one should feel pity for me, I’m fine and totally able to take care of myself, my cats and my dogs.
What was left of Danica’s money was used for the renovation of two rooms in the house, one of which was refurbished in April and the other is about to be finished soon, the work is still in progress. The entire house was supposed to be renovated when Danica sold her apartment, but most of the money she had received was spent in the meantime on cat food and vet bills for the shelter cats. The sad truth is that our monthly costs are an average of around 2.500 euros, but we haven’t raised not even one third of that sum in ages with all the problems that needed to be solved, so we were using our personal savings and all of our income for as long as we could. Right now we are flat broke, we can’t keep borrowing money from friends and relatives forever (and we’re expected to pay off these debts one day also) so I fear we will soon reach the point of not being able to feed and treat the cats properly if we don’t think of something smart and soon.
We are now applying for various grants for shelter improvements, but without some serious help the shelter will not be able to hold on much longer.
If we somehow manage to get the funding we need, we could enlarge the outdoor enclosure for the cats while strengthening the existing chain linked fence (which is a must this summer as it’s barely holding up, after sagging under the weight of snow year after year) and we would get 30 square meters more. We need fencing with finer mesh that could be added to the existing fence which is already enclosing the shelter as it’s become weaker as time’s gone by and the links are too large to prevent little kittens and skinnier adults as well from escaping through the wire. It would still leave us with half of this property empty, as the shelter currently occupies less than one half of it and if we succeed in finding enough sponsors sometime in future, we would be able to build one more outdoor enclosure as big as this one, with at least one large kitty room. Then we’d have enough space to take in dozens of lonely, hopeless and abused strays who would be our temporary residents – we could get them ready for adoption and they would stay with us until finding well screened forever homes.
That being said, I hope the time will come when we’ll be able to replace the outdoor fence which is already threatening to fall on us. From this point on, we will have to create monthly fundraisers for covering the costs of cat food and vet care for around 130 shelter cats (I’ll continue supporting my own pets, like I’ve done for years). However, I’m honestly not able to cover the ongoing costs of all the shelter kitties, regardless of how much I wish I could, so if and when we fail to raise enough funds, the cats will go hungry and without proper vet care. And if the shelter closes down due to the lack of funding, it will be the end for all of its residents. We are doing everything we can to stay afloat, but we can’t give what we don’t have and we don’t know how to find money where there is none. We’ve fulfilled all of our legal obligations a long time ago, all of the shelter cats are vaccinated, spayed/neutered and the younger ones are microchipped as well, but we have never had any kind of help from the state in the form of Governmental funding to help and improve the conditions for our shelter residents. Felix shelter, like all of the shelters in the world, relies entirely on donations, on good will and the generosity of supporters around the world; if we don’t receive enough support, the shelter will cease to exist in the near future. And if we have to beg, cry and plead for help two times a day, so be it. Thank you to all of you who’ve had enough patience to read this post and a thousand thanks to those who have been diligently supporting our kitties for years now!
Shrimp trawling is one of the primary threats to sea turtle survival in the United States. Every year, the shrimp trawl fishery incidentally captures and drowns thousands of sea turtles, including the critically endangered Kemp’s ridley sea turtles in the Gulf of Mexico.
Turtle Island asked you to take action and submit comments to the Gulf of Mexico Fishery Management Council calling on them to keep in place an existing shrimp fishing permit moratorium to protect sea turtles. The Council agreed with our comments and the today, thanks to your activism, the moratorium remains! This is a major victory and we thank you for helping us achieving this goal.
Green, hawksbill, Kemp’s ridley, leatherback, and loggerhead sea turtles are just some of the unique marine animals that inhabit the same ecosystem used by shrimp trawlers. Commercial fisheries that catch these turtles in pursuit of shrimp and other fish are major contributors to the decline of sea turtle populations and a threat to the future recovery of these endangered species.
The shrimp permit moratorium will ensure that no extra shrimpers are on the water, and reduce the number of sea turtles and other animals killed by shrimp fishery vessels. These animals are important to the ocean ecosystem, and they are also important economically for the Gulf’s tourism industry.
We will continue to push the Council to protect sea turtles by putting in place even stronger standards. This victory is an important step in the right direction for allowing sea turtle populations in the Gulf to rebound and recover.
Posted on July 27, 2016 by Serbian Animals Voice (SAV)
Mark –
Bad news for the Kemp’s ridley.
The common-sense proposal to expand the Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary is being opposed by both the fishing industry and oil and gas companies.
Sea turtles have been under constant threat in the Gulf of Mexico in recent years. They need a break.
SAV Comment – we have donated today as we feel that protection for those that survive in the oceans is paramount – be they whales; polar bears or turtle hatchlings. Please join us today – SAV
Thank you for your donation!
Your support will help Turtle Island’s work to bring back the world’s sea turtles and sharks, and California’s wild salmon, from the brink of extinction.
We accomplish our mission through grassroots and policy-maker education, consumer empowerment, strategic litigation and by promoting sustainable local, national and international watershed and marine policies.
You can do more for marine wildlife right now by taking action and joining us on Facebook. We hope you’ll share our work with your friends!
———————–
Join us at Cocos Island Aug 19-31 on a scientific research expedition to protect sharks and sea turtles! Over the course of 12 days and 20+ dives you’ll be catching and tagging turtles, counting sharks, and deploying underwater listening devices.
Recent dives at Cocos Island National Park in Costa Rica have found incredibly abundant sharks, rays and other marine wildlife thanks to the La Nina weather event. Check out this recent Trip Report from July 11-23 and view the amazing wildlife video.
Our expeditions travel aboard the Undersea Hunter’s vessels, with a wonderful crew, fresh meals, and spacious accommodations. Your share of the research trip costs may be tax deductible for US citizens.
For more information, click here. Feel free to contact me at info@tirn.net or 1-800-859-7283 with any questions.
I hope you can join us for this crucial research expedition!
Posted on July 23, 2016 by Serbian Animals Voice (SAV)
This world does not work according to the principle of justice.
No one gives us the right to keep animals in farms and slaughter them as if they just ware bags of potatoes.
And yet, we do it.
No one gives us the right torturing to death animals in experiments laboratories because some criminal idiot want to make career and money.
And yet, we do it.
The list of crimes against animals is infinite.
This list gets longer every day, for this 7 billion people on this planet are to blame.
All those who eat meat, wear fur, go to the circus, consume drugs, are “second hand” criminals!
They participate in a system that consists only of torture, blood, murder.
It is the system of exploitation of the weak, of the powerless, of the animals.
Against this medieval system some Knights of the Renaissance are fighting: These are the animal rights activists, the animal advocates, animal campaigners, animal ethicist..
We all want the elimination of animal suffering.
For all these people even worse than the suffering of animals is the fact, that this system is not easy to eliminate.
And certainly not today or tomorrow.
Therefore, we have learned over the years to make small steps, to focus our fight on important changes and to live with small victories.
We all want the elimination of animal suffering.
But none of us knows, how we can make the abolition of the slaughterhouses, the fur farms, the chemistry laboratories.
We rescue animals at the place where and when it is feasible, we take part in demonstrations against fur farms, we inform the people with letters, mails, roads actions ….
Some courageous liberate animals from laboratories or destroying hunting facilities …
But all, all who have the experience in this field, know that only a miracle can change this suffering and misery.
This experience says also, that we have to fight anyway.
Even if we could save a few animals from the brutal dog meat trade in S. Korea, or some wild animals in Suzhou/China Circus” the fight is worthwhile!
Animal welfare has never worked under the method “all or nothing”.
Because if we want all or nothing, then we end up mostly to nothing!
Venus
Serbian Animals Voice (SAV) 