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My Journey to the Dominican Republic(March 31st – April 14th 2016)
1. Tourism and Animal welfare in Punta Cana2. Meeting with Peace Corps3. Spay and neuter operative in Samaná (part 1)4. Spay and neuter operative in Samaná (part 2)5. Spay and neuter operative in Samaná (part 3)6. The Caribbean dream…
6. The Caribbean dream…
The Caribbean was never a paradise. Arawak and Caribe Indians fought here against each other even before Christopher Columbus arrived. Then the Europeans came and brought slavery. They disappeared again when Europe discovered beet sugar and the Caribbean sugar industry collapsed leaving behind them an impoverished, underdeveloped and traumatized people of former slaves. The trauma of colonial days is present everywhere in the Caribbean up to this day.
Also the second rush of whites, this time coming as tourists, didn’t bring luck and prosperity to the Caribbean. The foreign investors making millions here are neither obligated by law nor apparently by their own moral standards to render development aid to this region.
But as long as there are coconut palms swaying above white sandy beaches and turquoise water in the soft breeze of the trade winds the Caribbean will remain the promised land for countless people and nobody should leave here without experiencing this magic and taking the memory of it back home.
Las Galeras is a colorful little community…
I stayed with Kim. We had lots to talk about…The Humane Education school program that I had gotten after years of searching from the Asociación Nacional Protectora de Animales in Costa Rica comprises teaching material for all age groups from 5 – 15 years teaching children and adolescents love and respect for animals and responsible and proper ways to treat them. It shall be the beginning of our project „Animal welfare with local people“, the last building stone that shall complete our concept for Caribbean animal welfare together with spay & neuter and the project „Tourism and Animal welfare“. It will be introduced at schools in September after the summer holidays by a team of advanced students trained for such purposes by CEBSE, the organization for conservation and eco-development of Samaná Bay and its surroundings. CEBSE focuses very much on the protection of the marine fauna and flora and Kim who has introduced whale watching in Samaná works closely with CEBSE who have developed their own educational program with the emphasis on marine biology. It is a good time to start such programs because day schools are just starting in the region and teaching materials are in demand. The school program is a first step. Out-of-school activities will be needed to teach children, adolescents and also interested adults proper animal care. We envision a „Humane Education & Rescue Center“ with a dog school training dogs for example in obedience and agility to show that the local viralatas are as intelligent and valuable as any purebred dogs teaching right treatment and care at the same time. The dog school will have to be mobile to reach as many people as possible even where children don’t have access to Humane Education at schools yet and at the same time it will have to cover community outreach tasks like supplying anti-parasitical medication to fight the most common diseases, bringing food to those who need it, treating minor medical issues, listing spay & neuter candidates and transporting animals to the vet and back. Kim and I agree that in addition to animal welfare organizations every community needs a key person for animal welfare issues to take care of daily tasks like the maintenance of feeding stations, administering of medication, educating other residents, listing animals for spay & neuter campaigns, reporting sick, injured or abused animals and offering foster care. I am convinced that only if these tasks will be carried out eventually by local people a sufficient and lasting coverage can be achieved. The local helpers will have to be raised from the generation of children that are reached by the Humane Education program. Also here a mobile dog school can help: When visiting Santa Maria I learnt that Peace Corps volunteer Leyla chose children as soon as possible as leaders of her youth groups to run activities also in her absence, the only chance to continue projects after the service of a volunteer ends. A mobile dog school could pick suitable kids in the same way as group leaders to carry out any of the above mentioned tasks and the care for equipment and the location where courses take place. Fabricating agility equipment from local material could be a wonderful group project…In the long run and as final result the projects „Tourism & Animal welfare“ and „Animal welfare with local people“ should correlate with one another: When local animal keeping has reached the necessary level foster care could be offered to tourists sponsoring an animal they want to rescue. Locals could profit from that, expensive shelters that become killing pounds only too often could become history and the contact and understanding between locals and tourists could grow thus even promoting sustainable tourism.
The puppy from the beach of Las Pascualas is doing great, Armada, the half-paralyzed bitch, feels very much at home at Kim’s…Only the little amputated Chihuahua didn’t make it. He seemed to recover, began to walk around and eat but again and again he dropped back into a semi- anaethetized state. In the third night he passed away. What was the cause? Were shock and anaesthesia too much for this fragile organism? Did he die from organic failure? Did he suffer already from an advanced sepsis? The injury had happened days before he was brought to the vets and the paw had been bandaged to the leg with a non-sterile tape during this time. Did he have additional internal injuries or an already existing unknown heart condition? We’ll never know. One thing is certain: Without the attempt to rescue him with an emergency surgery he would have died very painfully from a sepsis within a few days. R.I.P., little guy! Monika, Julia and I went to Playa Rincón for a day.
The beach of Rincón Bay at the north-eastern tip of the Dominican Republic has a reputation of being particularly beautiful and I had wanted to come here already in 2012 but a tight schedule hadn’t allowed it and I had spent my beach day on Cayo Levantado instead, this tiny, touristic ally exploited island located directly in front of Santa Barbara. The Playa Rincón is not as easily accessible as other beaches. I met Julia and Monika in Las Galeras, we took a guagua for the first part of the way, then changed to motoconchos which took us on a gravel road down to the beach.
Entrances to Playa Rincón exist only at the far ends of the beach and only there are 2 small restaurants. The eastern entrance is also used by hotel busses. In-between…nothing! No people, no touristic enterprises – but a lot of space to walk along the beach…
The next day we visited the waterfall of El Limón. The path to the waterfall is long, steep and rocky, covered in deep mud after tropical rains. The best way to go there is on horseback, the horses being as sure-footed as mountain goats.
Geidhy told us that „there was something wrong“with the puppies in Las Pascualas and Kim and I went there to look after them. We found this little girl that was unhappy because its mother wouldn’t let it give milk to the puppy – Thank God! – not because the mother knows what puppies need but because milk is too precious…Kim explained to her that milk would cause the puppy only diarrhea and bellyache. The siblings of Wendy and Glendy seemed to be all right otherwise, only the sister of the puppy that is now at Kim’s house was apathetic, had fever, didn’t eat and its gums were bright yellow. We took it to the clinic of Dr. Francis where it got an infusion. Its chances were very bad and though I have no news yet I don’t think that it survived.
…holding this puppy in his hands that is only a few weeks old. He had just found it in the middle of the Malecón. Mostly likely it had been abandoned there to get run over because it is a female. She has been very lucky but this incident shows how much work is left to do despite the positive potential I have often recognized in people during the operative in Las Pascualas. I hope that I can find a way to spend more time here in the next years to support the animal welfare work with local people. The next day I returned to Punta Cana. We will have an annual operative in Samaná from now on; the next one shall be in El Limón. The school program will not only be used in Samaná but also in Santo Domingo by Cat Lovers RD who focus strongly on education and with whom we’ll have our first cat spay & neuter clinic with Dr. Josef Beisl in August. Peace Corps director Adele Williams, also on the board of Cat Lovers RD, will introduce the school program to the Peace Corps volunteers. A second vet team will be set up to operate in the bateyes of the southwest because it’s getting too much for Anja Heß and her team alone. I met Sylvia Méndez from RescátaMe again at the airport of Punta Cana. We agreed that we won’t send vets from Europe to Punta Cana presently because RescàtaMe is doing quite well at the moment as far as vets are concerned. Apart from Caribe Spay Neuter who come annually for a high volume campaign operating several hundred animals at once there are local organizations like the Fundación Pets Breeding Control of Dra Lourdes Ripley or the Fundación Animales en Peligro of Dra Gisselle Santos that hold smaller clinics several times a year and Dr. José Malaret who is available all year round. But we will provide means as needed to make sure that resort animals can be spayed and neutered also in cases where hotels allow RescátaMe to become active but refuse to participate themselves in covering the costs or help with transporting the animals to the vet and back because they haven’t yet fully realized the importance and benefits of humane population control of stray animals. There is a great update on our page Animal-friendly hotels in the Caribbean: 5 Punta Cana hotels could be added raising the number up to 21 hotels of 104 that cooperate with animal welfare in Punta Cana. It takes only a handful to reach the milestone of 25%! Already it is certain that Punta Cana is not only the largest All-Inclusive center of the Caribbean but also the community with the largest number of hotels that cooperate with animal welfare. And all that has been achieved in only one and a half years! Only since September 2014 receive the hotels there our petition. At that time there was only one hotel that could be called animal-friendly, the VIK hotel Arena Blanca. |
