Dear Friend,

Can you measure saved lives with a ruler? I can.

But first, let me measure the distance between Romania, where I live and the country where you live. Romania has about 20 million human inhabitants. Your country has 3 times more dogs companions then Romania. Yet…

Romania has as many homeless dogs on any given day as the shelters in a country like USA receive all year!

Compared to Romania, your country is a powerful economic country.

GDP as an economic measure, means “Gross Domestic Product”. But it can also mean “Good Dog People” As the Romanian economic GDP rises, we hope to raise our numbers of “Good Dog People” too, so that more dogs can find homes and fewer are abandoned.

As well as helping the homeless dogs of our community, ROLDA is helping the children to grow up to be “Good Dog People”. Traditionally, few Romanians keep dogs in their small apartments, so most children know dogs only as creatures of the streets. At the countryside, dogs companions are kept tied in chain all their lives and the children from villages have a direct way of interacting with these creatures (or with the farm animals). With some education and the right guidance, the children from villages of Romania have the potential and the conditions for more room for bigger hearts to bring more dogs in.

Villages in Romania are the most impoverished areas, where the people barely subsist from one week to another. The economic difficulties reflect on how the animals are looked after.

The ROLDA Adoption Center was visited by 60 children from nearby villages’ schools. The dogs’ enthusiasm for having visitors was matched by the children’s enthusiasm for becoming acquainted with dogs, learning new things about them – like dogs’ behavior, what sterilization means and why it is important and discovering the work of animal sheltering.

The hopes raised by these compassionate children’s visit couldn’t be measured with a ruler …but we can use a ruler to measure saved lives!

The ROLDA team rescues street dogs who are about to be killed by the authorities and instead places them into spacious, safe kennels until they are all adopted.

Most go to other nations in Europe, where almost all dogs have had homes for generations and the authorities long ago quit killing dogs to control their number.

The Romanian authorities gave an ultimatum to all the Romanians who have a dog (or more) as pets to sterilize and microchip them, to register them in the national database or they will face serious penalties (a fine could go up to 1500 EUR while the average real salary for a Romania rarely goes over 250 EUR/month).

While this constrictive measure will have positive results in the long run, it will have catastrophic consequences for the coming months, when many poor Romanians will prefer to get rid of the “problem” and instead paying huge veterinary bills, the number of the abandons will increase dramatically.

To prevent that, ROLDA is committed to start a social campaign to help the poor families from the nearby village, covering the costs for sterilizing and micro chipping a dog that needs to keep his home safe!

It costs 26 EUR to sterilize microchip and register in the National database a dog.

Thanks to the first donations received,  we started the sterilization and micro chipping to help poor people from the village to keep their pets as requires the new law and in the same time, we help these dogs keep safe their homes and not end up homeless.

Every year, ROLDA transforms hundreds of semi-wild dogs into safe companions for the right people. If you have a moment, please visit rolda.org to read more about our recent activities.

Our dogs come to us with no birthdays to celebrate, as nobody knows when a street dog is born. Learning as puppies to run and hide from dangers and to fear danger from people, our dogs arrive afraid that they will spend the rest of their lives in a kennel, shared with other dogs who were also born unwanted or were abandoned.

To most of our dogs, our shelters’ workers are the first people who know they exist!

In our shelters, the dogs are given fresh water and good food and each gets a clean bed with a cozy blanket. That’s about all they have but this makes them prosperous compared to the dogs in other shelters and outside, on the streets, they have much less. For each of our dogs the days come and go. Gradually, they become calmer and more trusting.

 

Sometimes they see shelters’ workers coming to measure other dogs with a ruler. Then those dogs are walked outside, on a leash – and never come back!

The dogs left behind have no way to know exactly what this means, but they know that the shelter workers are happy and that someone coming with a ruler means something good is about to happen.

What the ruler means is that the dogs who are measured have been adopted by people who saw them on our website or on our Facebook page! Soon, those dogs will meet people who have chosen to give them an identity, love and respect. We measure the height and the length of the adopted dogs to see which crates they will need on their Flights to freedom.

You can adopt a dog, too! Please follow this web link: www.sponsoradog.ro

The ruler ceremony is the moment that transforms each dog into a pet companion.

Most dogs of Romania never enjoy the simple pleasure of spending at least a small part of their lives in a lovely place called home. They don’t get the chance of being rescued from death on the streets or in the local pounds that are horrible canine concentration camps.

Please help us measure more lives saved!

Your contribution is making the difference between life and death for each rescued dog.

And this is something a ruler can measure!

Our yardstick for this year is to sterilize and microchip 200 pets from the poor Romanian community from the village. Will you help us measure up?

PS. At ROLDA we have a “ruler ceremony”: it’s when we measure the height and length of adopted dogs to see which crates they will need on their flights to freedom. Although the other dogs can’t know what this means, they do know that our shelters’ workers are happy and that’s a good thing! Please be as generous as you can with us, for them!