Animal Welfare: Managing Stray Cats and Dogs

Dear Supporters,

Playa del Carmen is one of the fastest growing places in the world, and now more than ever, due to COVID-19 it has a floating population, this characteristics makes our work vital to prevent animal suffering, as we create awareness in the importance of humane population control of dogs and cats, nowadays we keep on helping preventing abandonment and do our best to keep families together, helping them arrange their papers to travel without leaving behind their pets.

We started 10 years ago, and we continue our work in the Riviera Maya sterilizing dogs and cats, educating the people in responsible companion animals’ guardianship and empowering the community so people can be responsible for their own rescues, to increase animal welfare and improve the community’s quality of life. 

We have also been supporting the community by educating on PREVENTION, especially now with a very active hurricane season upon us.

In these times we´ve been teaching the community how to take care of themselves whilst not forgetting our companion animals. 

We keep on working with the WHO and our government’s guides to keep our staff and the population safe from coronavirus.

We´ve become as paperless as possible, relying on telephone messages (whatsapp) and the internet (facebook). People cannot go inside unless they have an appointment, and they use mandatory masks, hand sanitizer and they have to go through a disinfectant mat. 

We were fortunate enough to be able to continue some sterilization efforts, doing especially spays for females at risk, feral and stray cats and dogs, to avoid unwanted pregnancies, and also male neuters to avoid abandonment due to behavioural problems. We were able to help a lot of low income families, unemployed families and people of good heart that rescued an animal, but couldn’t afford to help it any other way.

We managed to do 821 sterilization surgeries in these 3 months.

We also tried our income messages to be able to help properly, we do as much as we can with the resources at hand, and we also empower people guiding them and helping them do responsible rescuers. We were able to give urgent medical attention to 603 animals, by deworming, vaccinating, getting rid of fleas and ticks, tending to other health issues like ringworm, ehrlichia, etc.

During the pandemic and the return to the “new normal” we never stopped working, fortunately, by law, we were considered essential workers, so we helped by enforcing measures to keep the community safe without caring for animal welfare. 

We focused on helping all animals in need including not only recently rescued animals but all the unemployed people that had companion animals that needed urgent help. 

We continued our main goal by sterilization surgeries, but we reduced our surgeries in order to keep staff safe and we had to put on hold our voluntary programs to keep as many people as we could safe at home. 

Thanks to your support we were able to help 821 animals until august 31st, through free or low cost sterilization, and to help 603 animals with medical care.

The community keeps on demonstrating that our support is not only well received but needed, we receive around 100 messages a day we keep a full agenda doing sterilization surgeries and consults, although every now and then there´s an urgent walk-in patient, we mostly work by appointment.

Help us spread the word on responsible guardianship of companion animals so we can all have healthy communities and happy families, remember prevention is key to achieve this goal.

A very big thank you for your continued support!

With Gratitude,

Mexico Vets