Help our Animal Hospital Survive Covid-19 Crisis

Local restrictions may have lifted here in Rajasthan, but India is still coping with the pandemic and the effect this has had on the economy and international travel. Foreigners are still not allowed to enter the country so our local town of Pushkar has been deprived of the usual inundation of tourists which populate the many hotels, cafes, and restaurants. The knock-on effect for the street animals is the lack of leftovers, either inadvertently scavenged or offered kindly by both locals and visitors. We have also missed the donations and support from passing tourists, who often come out to TOLFA after hearing about us in the town.

Despite this we are still dedicated to the rescue and care of the street animals and in February we reached a total of 3,069 individual animals through all our projects. Of these we rescued 469 animals from pain and injury, and performed sterilisation operations on 116 dogs.

There was also the annual Urs festival in nearby Ajmer, during which time we kept almost 300 dogs at TOLFA as a public safety measure, while also checking the health of those dogs, administering rabies vaccinations, and sterilising them as required. This festival was the original reason TOLFA began 15 years ago, as the local municipality’s previous solution to clearing the area of street dogs (the festival attracts hundreds of thousands of worshippers) was to take them and leave them to die, tied up, in the desert.

What a change TOLFA has seen since those days, with many more street dogs having attentive care-givers who feed and watch out for them, calling TOLFA as soon as they become unwell.

Included are some photos of our work and animals.

Thank you very much for your continued and vital support!