I want to tell you about a unique McDonald’s.
Not the food – what is happening inside it.
In the earthquake zone in Caracas in Venezuela, a group of volunteer vets and doctors has turned a McDonald’s restaurant into a temporary animal clinic.
Where the tables used to be, animals are receiving medical treatment, care and compassion.
I stood in the queue with them.
Dogs pulled out of the rubble. Cats with crush injuries. And families – people who have lost their homes, carrying animals across a broken city because they would not leave them behind.
Nobody there could pay. Nobody was asked to.
Source: NFA/Luke Barritt
Every animal brought through that door was treated free of charge, by volunteers who are not being paid either.
The McDonald’s was available for one frightening reason. A neighboring building was so unstable that it was in danger of collapsing onto the restaurant. McDonald’s had to temporarily close.
That empty restaurant became an extraordinary refuge. Where families once sat down to eat, volunteer vets began saving animals with broken legs, crush injuries and infected wounds – animals with nowhere else to turn.
Now McDonald’s is ready to begin operating again and needs the premises back. The volunteers have been given days to leave. The place that sheltered this clinic in the worst of the emergency must be handed back, and the clinic has nowhere else to go.
Source: NFA/Dan Snyders
Network for Animals is already helping.
When I visited, I asked the vets what they needed most. They gave me a list of medicines.
We bought everything on the list and delivered it to them. By the time we did so, the animals needed more. So we scoured the earthquake zone for what they needed. Then we did it again the next day. And the next. Every day we were in Venezuela.
We also delivered animal food, paid veterinary bills so treatment could continue, and provided transport cages for rescuers to move injured animals without further hurting them.
Luke Barritt, NFA’s campaign director on the ground in the earthquake zone buying supplies for volunteers helping injured animals. Source: NFA/Dan Snyders
But then I encountered an unexpected problem. McDonald’s wants their restaurant back and the clinic must either close or move.
We cannot let the clinic shut down . Animals injured in the recent devastating earthquakes are still being found with broken legs, infected wounds and injuries that will kill them if left untreated.
In my job I travel from one disaster zone to the next but the Venezuelan earthquake caused devastation that shocked me to my core. An entire city has been flattened, skyscrapers and houses, restaurants and clinics. There is almost nothing left. Rescuers are still finding animals in damaged buildings – one cat was found alive more than a month after the earthquake struck. The earthquake may have dropped out of the headlines now but the animal suffering is still cataclysmic.
The need is simple, the animals must have medicine and treatment urgently.
Please help keep the medicine flowing while a search takes place for another venue.
Right now, Network for Animals is raising $15,000 (£11,300) to keep the McDonald’s clinic running for as long as possible. Here is exactly what your gift buys:
- $25 (£19) – a day of antibiotics and pain relief for the animals in the clinic
- $60 (£45) – emergency treatment for one animal pulled from the rubble
- $150 (£115) – a full week of medicine for the whole clinic
Please help them today.
Source: NFA/Dan Snyders
We are helping the volunteers find safe new premises to treat animals where the earthquake damage has been stabilized. Those helping at the Macdonald’s are ordinary local people – vets, doctors and neighbors. They sprang into action when they saw the animals around them devastated by the quake and they seized the opportunity that an empty McDonald’s presented.
The volunteers have not charged for a single animal treatment. They have not turned away a single animal.
Please give whatever you can today to let their kindness continue.
