Happy new year!
Here we are again; Yaiza and Karin. We were in charge of Refugio Cantalobos, but due to family issues we had to leave the shelter and another non-for-profit took over, rescuing abandoned animals and finding them good homes.
We are now living in the countryside of Frigiliana. We have realised that we cannot live without helping animals and have decided to create a mini-shelter in our own house, where we live with our own 5 dogs and 10 mistreated galgos (spanish greyhounds) which will live with us from the 2nd of January 2016 until we find good homes for them in Germany and Switzerland through our 2 collaborating associations.
For us it was essential to be legal and so have created a legally constituted non-for-profit called Asociación Galgo Freedom with NIF.: G-93446094.
At Refugio Cantalobos, our major fundraiser was the pet hotel. But now at Galgo Freedom we depend 100% on donations to be able to cover the needs of our mistreated galgos for them to recover from their physical and psychological wounds.
Most galgos live in garages with no light or ventilation, scarce food and water, no hygiene. Their owners see them as mere hunting tools. A galgo that is “useless” is hang from an olive tree, thrown to a well where it perishes or abandoned. The “galgueros” (galgo owners) don’t hide this fact and they tell you this in the face with total normality. It’s a tradition. 50.000 galgos are abandoned and killed every year in Spain.
A month ago I went to la Puebla de Cazalla, a village in the province of Sevilla, where a group of 3 young ladies that belong to our team leave their personal lives aside (family, children, studies and their jobs) to help. They immerse themselves into the “galgo world”, dealing with the galgueros to convince them to give us the “unwanted” galgos and rescue the abandoned galgos from the street.
In this trip we rescued 5 galgos: 2 from the street and 3 from a galguero who had them locked in, in individual cages inside a garage. As our house was not fenced in, we could not bring them home, so we took them to our foster family in Sevilla where they will be staying until the 2nd of January when our vet, Augusto and I (Yaiza) will be driving a van to pick them up and bring them home.
