Let us face it! Unless the dogs are completely fit and well-fed, the life of a stray dog is miserable. They don’t get food on time, they don’t get water on time, nor do they have any shelter. If they are sick, injured or beaten, they are left to die. Without medications and help, they can’t survive.
What is an animal shelter?
People believe that animals are euthanized in shelters, that is not entirely true. While some shelters do practice it, most shelters help animals. If you visit a shelter you can find rescued animals, animals that have been left by their owners, injured animals, sick animals and all sorts of animals that need help. Many shelters also provide medical facilities to dogs, such as vaccination, deworming, neutering, medicine prescription, etc.
Dog shelters are doing this amazing thing by helping dogs, we can help them. Not all of us can afford to start a shelter or help all street dogs but we can support them. And support doesn’t mean only financial aid; there are other things that could help a dog shelter. The following are some of the ways that you can follow.
- Providing Food
A dog shelter has a lot of dogs. Often shelters run out of food supply. Especially with puppies and small dogs, it becomes difficult for the shelter owners to keep up with the food demand of the shelter.
Even a small help from a few people is appreciated in shelters. Regularly sponsoring food for the shelter, helping them keep the food demands in check will help the shelter a lot. Sparing money regularly for a shelter is a good thing to do.
- Providing Other material help
Shelters constantly require blankets, newspapers, cleaning stuff among other things. Just like food, it is difficult for a shelter owner to keep up with this demand.
You can donate old blankets, newspapers, cleaning stuff, etc., to the shelter. You can also donate old good condition material that you think would be helpful for the shelter. Not only that you can also assist the shelter in keeping up the demands of such perishable items by providing specific monetary aid.
- Providing Medical help
Some of us who are a veterinary doctor can go to the shelter to see if they require any medical help. A shelter has many sick and injured animals. The main job of a shelter is providing help to cure these rescue animals who find it difficult to survive outside. These animals constantly require medical help, medical prescriptions, and medical procedures among other things.
Though a shelter a lot of times has got a doctor who is paid for his/her services you can always go and assist the shelter in keeping up with the medical demands.
Visiting once a week, creating reports, suggesting some basic changes etc are some of the ways you can medically help a shelter.
- Sponsoring a dog
As said earlier, a shelter has a lot of dogs. While most of them are healthy some are abandoned, some are sick dogs some of them are medically unfit dogs. A shelter has to put a lot of money and efforts in taking care of these dogs.
While you may not need to give large amounts of money to the shelter, what you can do is select a dog and take care of all the monetary requirements of the dog. Right from its food to medications to medical procedures. You can start small by one dog and eventually depending upon your income, you can sponsor up to 10 -12 dogs.
- Volunteering
All the while we talked about the monetary need of a shelter, but what a shelter needs a lot are. A shelter throughout the month has got different activities. You can keep up with those activities and help by providing help in any task required.
If you are a student or someone who doesn’t have enough money to spare for now, or even if you don’t believe in donating money you can always volunteer.
Even visiting a shelter a few times a week can help the animals to a whole lot of extent.
- Monetary help
Although a lot of people wish to help some just cannot help. Some have time constraints, some are allergic to dogs among several other reasons. The best you can do is keep up with the monetary requirements of the shelters. You can donate the best in your capacity. Anyone can donate to a shelter.
Author: Ester Adams
