Our Shelter in Portugal - Part 1

I created this blog especially for Solhund and Hundrondellen groups to make us known better

Portugal is a country in Southern Europe, with about 10 million people. It lies close to Spain at the so called Iberian Peninsula. It even could belong to Spain, some centuries ago they even made wars about it ... but nowadays they are best friends.

Today Portugal is mostly known for their great beaches, Port wine and of course, football players like Eusébio, Figo and more recently, Cristiano Ronaldo. It also belongs to the European Union and we pay in Euro.

Like almost every country in South Europe, we got a big dog problem. People mostly don’t care about those animals, most shelters are full and it’s getting worse. The recent economic crisis is not helping at all! Some of those shelters do not have the capacity of keeping them, so they simply put them asleep! There is a strange law who says that once a dog is captured in a public shelter, they got 8 days do “resolve” the problem, if not, the dog is murdered! Thank God this is not the way that private shelters like ours work, we do our best to feed them well and get for them the best medical assistance possible.

Our Kennel is situated near Beja, a city about 150km from the Algarve and 180km from Lisbon. The region is Alentejo, known for their big landscapes and hot weather in the summer, but also known as a hunting area, in the recent past, most of the abandoned animals were hunting dogs, bus strangely today most dogs are small ones, we think the main reason is money problems of the owners, they can’t keep them anymore.

Believing the last count, we got about 120 animals, and more 30 in foster homes. All of them have to be feet and kept in good health. This costs money, of course. So, we created an association where members pays 20€ each year. But, with the crisis, many members went out, and if it wasn’t for the good will if a big selling surface (Intermarché) and some campaigns we organize, the situation would be much worse as it already is.

In our shelter we got only dogs, we don’t have the facilities for cats, but some volunteers are helping at this matter too, by publishing cases in the internet or with being a foster home.  

Next weekend I’ll put here some pictures of our kennel and will do some more explications about it. If you got any question please just ask.