Making Happy Tails for Street Dogs in Rwanda

Dear friends and supporters, 

Who can believe we’re almost at the end of 2025? This year has flown past! 

As always, we love to report on all the successes we’ve had in the last 3 months. Between August and now, we: 

• Rescued 13 dogs and puppies 
• Rehomed 14 dogs (in September alone we had 10 successful adoptions – our best ever month at WAG!) 
• Taught a week-long animal welfare course for students and faculty at the University of Rwanda College of Veterinary Medicine
• Ran two trainings on dog bite awareness, prevention and management and responsible dog ownership as part of Rwanda’s rabies elimination efforts to build the capacity of healthcare professionals and youth volunteers to be ‘rabies ambassadors’ 
• Participated in the development of dog bite management guidelines and training materials for the community and healthcare professionals, with Rwanda Biomedical Centre and other partners 
• Hosted John, IBCM Manager for Mission Rabies Malawi, who ran a training for us on launching Integrated Bite Case Management (IBCM) in Rwanda: investigating dog bites, taking samples to test for rabies, and conducting contact tracing for both exposed humans and animals if rabies infection is found. This will be a huge step in rabies elimination and animal welfare efforts!

And another bit of good news from our WAG humans: Olivia and Richard welcomed their new baby, Iris Isimbi, at the beginning of November :) 

Some adoption highlights include: 

• Socks, AKA Mama WAG - our receptionist, visitor greeter and mama to the orphan pups - was adopted with 3-time WAG adopter Innocent! Sweet Socks joins WAG graduates Henry and Winnie and they are all thriving together, though we all miss her at the shelter. 
• Dan, who adopted Maple back in 2023, adopted 2 more WAG dogs for his farm: little Bella and Oreo - who had been at the shelter for a year and a half! Artemis and Hestia, who had also been at the shelter for longer than a year, were adopted by his neighbour Sam. The dogs were a bit scared of the cows at first, but now they spend their days with the herds and are loving being outdoors. 

Thanks to your ongoing support, our rescue work continues and we’ve welcomed some lovely dogs into our care, including the ‘girl gang’ Socks, Saint, Rain, Sandrine, Sheba, Maddy, and Charcoal, and several orphan puppies including Diana, Intwari, Amie and Kai. All of these female dogs could have given birth to at least 16 puppies a year, if left on the street. Rescuing these dogs, sterilising them, and giving them a second shot at a long, happy life has a direct impact on their lives but also on the community as well!

Next week we will be in Nyagatare at the University of Rwanda College of Veterinary Medicine to run a two-week training course led by our partners Worldwide Veterinary Service. 16 final-year veterinary students will be trained in how to castrate and spay dogs, and we will run 2 days of community outreach to sterilise as many dogs in the community as possible! Keep an eye out on our social media for updates on that, as well as more information on our rescue dogs, dogs available for adoption, and some upcoming fundraising news. 

We are so grateful for your support as we make more happy tails for dogs in Rwanda. As we always say, we couldn’t do it without you! We hope you enjoyed these updates and we’re sending you warm greetings from all the humans and dogs of WAG.