Start an Animal SanctuaryHow to Help Animals

If, like me, you are in the research phase of starting an animal sanctuary you may find the following resources helpful. It is also a good idea to spend some time volunteering at your local shelter, as this will give you an idea of whether the lifestyle of owning an animal sanctuary is right for you. As I am sure you know, it is far more than a job, it is something that will take over your life (but I like to think in a good way).

For me volunteering was hard work, but was so rewarding. Sure, there were upsetting times and you can see the huge cost of money and time that goes into maintaining the sanctuary, but the thing I liked most was just knowing I was finally doing something. Whilst I was there tending to the animals (no matter how mundane the task – think washing up food dishes) horrific things were still happening to animals in my country and the rest of the World, but I finally felt a kind of peace that I was doing something worthwhile and something to make a change. That is the only time in my life I felt that peace and I know what I need to do with my life.

Once you have decided starting an animal sanctuary is for you, you may want to take a look at the following:

1. Farm Sanctuary – Establishing a Sanctuary

This is my favorite resource, mainly because it is so relevant for the type of sanctuary I want to run – a farm animal sanctuary. This site is run by Farm Sanctuary in the US, which is a huge sanctuary over 2 sites (one in California and one in New York). The site provides loads of excellent information on how to properly establish your sanctuary and how to run it.

Not all of the information is relevant to me, as I live in Australia, but for people in the US you can find out about zoning issues and how to register and incorporate a charity.

Farm Sanctuary also runs courses on how to establish a farm sanctuary, which you can find out about at their main site: FarmSanctuary.org

There you can also find fact sheets to help you learn about basic care of farm animals.

2. Best Friends – How to Start a Sanctuary PDF

Best Friends provide a useful guide to starting an animal sanctuary. The information can be applied to various shelters, but Best Friends mainly looks after and re-homes cats and dogs.

Best Friends also has a forum, which could be useful to get your questions answered and make contacts. You can find out about various animals who need good, loving homes. Here is a link to the forum where you can click on Shelter Operation and Animal Care for the info you are looking for.

3. Shelter Planners of America

This site deals with the actual design and building of your animal shelter. They could be great people to call if you are at a further stage with your planning than me and are ready to build housing for the rescued animals. This would be extra relevant if you are planning to start a shelter for pets, such as dogs and cats, as this company seems to have a lot of experience in this field. They also provide information about fund-raising that may be useful to you.

4. Australian Cavy Rescue – Becoming a Rescue PDF

The Australian Cavy Rescue provides some excellent info for people who want to start a small animal sanctuary in Australia. This is a very useful resource, especially if you are concentrating on guinea pigs, rabbits or rodents.

5. How to Start and Run a Rescue

This book by Jennifer Williams is an excellent resource for anyone who wants to start a sanctuary. Here is what one reviewer on Amazon wrote:

This book is a REFERENCE BIBLE for anyone involved in rescuing animals. It covers everything you would think of, and most importantly, everything you would NOT think of, particularly for horse rescues. If I had owned this book years ago, I would have saved many more animals and much more money, but it is never too late to start now, buy this book, and improve the quality of any animal rescue facility for the sake of the animals. The detail is unbelievable in an easy, interesting to read format with plenty of colour photographs and real life examples. An EXCELLENT publication. Simply a MUST-HAVE for people thinking of or currently running an animal rescue.

Hopefully theses resources have got your research off to a good start. I will be providing further resources in the near future. Feel free to add any more useful resources in the comments below.

Right now I am so angry I needed somewhere to vent. I expect many of you have heard of the animal sacrifices that took place this week in Nepal for the Gadhamai Jatra Festival. I have signed various petitions and written letters, along with thousands of others, , but to no avail, . The Nepal government refused to stop the barbaric tradition. I am not sure of the exact number of animals hacked to death, but it was somewhere between 300,000 – 500,000

All week is has been playing on my mind, but only today I saw the photos and I feel so sick and angry. I won’t publish the pictures here, as I wouldn’t want you to see them, but they show people randomly hacking at buffalo, goats and other animals. One photo showed a buffalo trying to run away after surviving his first attack, only to be grabbed by the tail and pulled back to be hacked at again. Many animals die very slowly, as they are maimed by unqualified butchers. Other animals huddle together or try to run away as their companions are slaughtered.

Part of the tradition is that these animals cannot be consumed, so this is the epitome of cruelty and waste. These animals are sentient beings who do not deserve to be transported from India, only to suffer hideous death.

The streets run with blood and bodies and heads are strewn everywhere. All this for the “Goddess” of Power Gadhimai. Do you know what if you have a “Goddess” who is that evil, I wouldn’t bother trying to please her. These idiots think their wishes will be granted by sacrificing as many animals as possible in 2 days. WTF?! What kind of sick Disneyland do they live in, where wishes come true in a trade off with death?

We should all be getting angry about this. People shouldn’t be allowed to do whatever they want in the name of tradition or religion.

F*#k You Nepal!

Hello!

Welcome to StartanAnimalSanctuary.com My name is Catherine and since I was 16 I was sure I wanted to start an animal sanctuary.

I always loved animals and me and my best friend Melissa both went vegetarian at age 10, much to the dismay of our meat loving parents! When we turned 16 we were finally old enough to volunteer at our local animal sanctuary the Crowborough Animal Welfare Society in East Sussex, UK and we had a blast. Once we had learned the ropes we often took charge of all the morning duties, including cleaning out around 70 cat litter trays, mucking out Dennis, the Shetland pony and Annabelle the Jersey Cow, cleaning out the dog kennels and creating homes for new arrivals.

Whether it was creating a chinchilla play room out of an old stable, or scrubbing out water troughs in the field, we loved our voluntary work. In fact if we could we would have forgotten about school and spent all our time there.

The owner of the sanctuary Jo was a remarkable lady. She had started the shelter by working two jobs, including a night supermarket job and was spurred forward by an incredible desire to help animals. Melissa and Me learned so much from Jo and she instilled in me the desire to one day start my own sanctuary.

When I was 24 I moved to NSW, Australia where I married my husband David, who soon also adopted a veggie diet.

I read as much as I could about animals and as I learned more about animal rights, I realized if I really cared about animals I had to turn vegan. It was an easy and essential change.

One of my favourite organizations is Farm Sanctuary, based in the USA. They have huge shelters in New York and California and do an amazing job. If you haven’t already I urge you to head over and check out their website. One day I would love to visit (and hopefully volunteer) at Farm Sanctuary. There are also some amazing sanctuaries here in Australia.

So David and Me have set out our 5 year plan by the end of which we plan to open an Australian Farm Animal Sanctuary. Not only do we have a huge amount of research to do, we also have a huge amount of saving to do.

If you would like to follow our journey feel free to check this blog regularly, or sign up for our newsletter.

All the Best

Catherine x