Recently, the All-Ukrainian Animal Rescue Hotline celebrated the first anniversary. Operators of information consulting hotline of the Service for Wild, Exotic and Domestic Animals Rescue “Feldman Ecopark Good Home” accepted first calls to the free of charge number 0-800-302-303 slightly more than a year ago, at the end of 2017.
“Having faced a difficult situation, animals usually cannot help themselves. Caring people, animal protection activists come to the rescue, the Good Home Centre specializes in it for a long period of time. An objective we set for the hotline is to unite all such people, to create All-Ukrainian animal protection volunteer network. At the present time, we see that this system works. Dozens of volunteers and animal protection organizations absolutely in all regions of Ukraine are in the database of our Hotline. Wherever we are called upon to assist the wounded thrown and suffering animals – we will render assistance in a short period of time” — the initiator of hotline creation, the Ukrainian MP Oleksandr Feldman emphasized.
“This is the real consolidated community of rescuers. We aren’t personally familiar with many of volunteers, but we know that they will speedily come to the rescue and implement all necessary work in the city, we are deeply and sincerely grateful to each and every one for their assistance — the head of the Good Home Centre Iryna Podvoiska told. – The wounded fawn on Donbas, exhausted dog Stem roaming near the route in Kharkiv, young foxes founded under a porch in the Chernihiv oblast — there was a huge number of such stories during the year of Hotline’s operation.”
In a year operators of the hotline “Feldman Ecopark Good Home” received more than 3,000 addresses, and their number constantly increases and now reaches 30-40 per day. People call from both big cities, and the remote villages. The leaders among regions of Ukraine are the Kharkiv, Dnipropetrovsk, Odessa, Zhytomyr regions and the Kiev oblast as well.
According to operators of the Hotline, we often get calls concerning stray animals found on the street. Volunteers place information about these animals in numerous animal protection groups in social networks thanks to which the thrown ones manage to find new owners or a temporary shelter.
The second group of calls are messages about wounded and sick animals (including those hit by cars). Besides, we often get calls concerning animal abuse – in such cases, the Good Home specialists suggest how to write application to the police and how to get advice of a lawyer. Requests to remove a cat from a tree or to get out the animal got stuck in something or fallen into a hole sound regularly. Ukrainian military from the ATO zone ask questions of how to assist animals.
Besides, operators provide consultations on animal care, their treatment, nutrition, behavioral features and sterilization.
In most cases, hotline calls concern cats, dogs and other pets, often (especially during spring and autumn seasons) we receive calls concerning birds. Besides, among those who managed to be rescued are roes, squirrels, hedgehogs, rodents, chinchillas, turtles, snakes, lizards and even goannas and chameleons.
It should be reminded that Feldman Ecopark Good Home is engaged in the help to animals since 2010. In 2013, it became the Service for Wild, Exotic and Domestic Animals Rescue “Feldman Ecopark Good Home”. The project aimed at rescue of animals from ill-treatment, help to wounded animals and those got into trouble, reduction of quantity of stray animals with use of humane methods. Since the opening of the Centre, its workers and volunteers have already found new owners to nearly 22,000 pets and rescued more than 6,000 wild animals. The programme is implemented under the patronage of the International Charitable Foundation “Oleksandr Feldman Foundation”.
