Late at night, a small puppy suddenly appeared in our team’s car headlights, running towards them on a busy road. Then another appeared and then another and then a kitten.
Our team was driving to their next assignment after chronicling the heartrending abandonment of dogs and cats in the Balkan country of Montenegro.
Naturally, they stopped!
David Barritt, our executive director, flagged down the speeding traffic while videographer Wiktor Dobraczynski gathered up the babies. He found four puppies and two kittens. All had been dumped just a few minutes earlier. Wiktor collected a wiggling armful of grateful puppies and kittens and managed to pop them into the car trunk.
“Don’t bother with them,” said a motorist. “Let them die, there’s nothing you can do. It happens all the time.”
“Never!” said Barritt and turned the car around and drove to the Montenegrin town of Nikšić. It was then that our team got a first-hand experience of how hard it is to find people who will help animals in distress.
Everywhere we went for help, we were turned away.
“I’ll kill the cats for you,” said one man, “but I can’t do the dogs.”
Because you support Network for Animals, you know how this story ends. We never let animals down. Eventually, we found a caring vet who fostered the kittens and we got the head of the local animal shelter out of bed and persuaded him to stretch the rules to take the four pups into the overcrowded haven. (It helped that, thanks to supporters like you, we financially support the shelter.)
The puppies and kittens are SAFE, and we’ll make sure they remain so. But, the situation for dogs in Montenegro is absolutely awful. There are thousands upon thousands of abandoned animals, and we need your help to help them.
We have partnered with a Montenegrin animal welfare organization called NUZZ, which cares for street dogs and fights to improve animal welfare laws. With our help, they run spay and neuter programs and make sure street dogs are fed every day and given medical care when they need it.
We are making progress, but the biggest problem in Montenegro is that so many people are sickeningly cruel to animals.
What we’re about to tell you is so evil that it turns our stomachs. In a public park in the center of Nikšić, a man was filmed sexually assaulting one of the street dogs NUZZ cares for. The police were told, and the man questioned. Incredibly, he was back in the park the next day. Our team photographed him there.
This is the depth of the depravity we are up against and why it is so desperately important for you to support us!
With your donation, we will crusade against barbarity and fight for street dogs, whose lives are so hard that even a little love and attention goes a long way. Please if you possibly can, make a generous donation today.
For the animals,
Brian and Gloria Davies (and Max and Flora!)
Founders
Network for Animals
P.S. There are so many abandoned puppies and kittens in Montenegro that no one can count them all. So very few of them find forever homes that it breaks our hearts. We do our best, but we need your help on so many levels. Let’s make the word a better place for animals. Please donate today if you possibly can.
P.P.S. We just heard one of the kittens got adopted!