‼️🇳🇵RAVEN UPDATE 🇨🇦 ‼️
SUCCESS!!! We have a Raven in the house. The house of Animal Nepal, that is.
After several days of disappointment Tashi Penjo returned to the stupa and found and rescued Raven last night, while we in North America slept.
Raven was hesitant and gentle, he knew that he was finally getting help. Although he needed to be convinced to enter a taxi and a small cage at the treatment centre, he didn’t put up much resistance.
Tashi said he won his heart with his gentle demeanour. Raven is now safely at Animal
Nepal where he will stay for another two days until their vet arrives in Kathmandu, at which time we will have a diagnosis on the cause of his eye sore. The vet tech doubts it is TVT. If it is, we will be moving Raven to another facility for treatment.
He has a healing journey ahead and we will do everything possible to ensure his best chances to survive.
I received so much support for Raven. Huge thanks to Animal Nepal for agreeing to be his safe haven. To SPCA NEPAL and to Community Dog Welfare Kopan for offering their teams to help us.
Thank you to Valerie March and Christiane von Gartzen and Vasu Mohan for sending funds to support the rescue.
We still have to catch Bruce, who, despite looking better on the outside is in great need of rescue. We may still need reinforcements for Bruce.
Heartfelt thanks to everyone who has offered their support.
❤️
Namche failed his rabies titer test, which means both Namche and Temple have to wait in Nepal for a few more months.
Here are some truths about shelters and rabies vaccines.
1. There is a 99% chance that a dog entering a shelter in Nepal will contract an infectious disease called erlichiosis or ecanis. Dogs that enter with a broken bone leave with an infectious disease.
2. Rabies vaccines don’t have the same effect on dogs suffering from ecanis, sometimes rendering them useless.
3. Cold chain vaccines are the only vaccines that are effective. When a rabies vaccine is transported through the distribution channel above a certain temperature it is rendered ineffective. It doesn’t matter if your vet refrigerated it, if the suppliers didn’t.
Namche is being treated for ecanis. It is unclear whether he got it at KAT or he brought it from the mountains.
What we do know is that he was vaccinated twice and he still managed to fail the rabies titer test.
Great news for another Nepali dog! Cookie was rescued by Grace Hwa who adopted our Lhotse, and sheltered at Community Dog Welfare Kopan.
Thanks to Namche’s adopter Kaylan Marie Morley, Cookie has found a home in Seattle, and will be our third dog flying to that area. It is so lucky for these dogs to have such a great support system where they land.
Cookie will fly in just over two weeks!
Temple has been very happy since he arrived in Seattle. As you all know I sometimes feel compassion for the lives our chosen ones leave behind. Temple was part of a vibrant tight-knit pack. I wondered if he would long for his family, for his freedom to run with the pack chasing monkeys and to growl at the dogs of another pack at the same time every day.
I wonder these things because our position is one of responsibility. To take an animal away from its home even when it suffers there requires a high level of follow through to make sure that where it ends up is infinitely better. Our animals need people who are committed to their well being, to their health and socialization especially when things get rocky and uncertain.
Temple found that. It took nearly a year, and many medical visits and an incredible team of collaborators to help him with his health and transition from stray dog to house dog. We did it. ❤️❤️❤️🙏🙏🙏
Namche’s rescue begins!!! Prakash made it up to Namche (the town) in one day. First he flew to Lukla, the most dangerous airport in the world, and was the only person on the flight due to it being off season for tourists, then he walked a two day journey in one day. #mountainboy
He collected Namche (the dog) from the shelter tonight (his morning) and they are starting the journey down. We have decided he should hire someone to help him as he nears Lukla, because there are so many stray dogs there, and it could be dangerous for both of them.
More updates to come! Namche is walking so well on a leash,. I am very sure he knows he’s getting the heck out of the place and he’s all for it!!!
More to come on the rescue.
Go Namche and Prakash ❤️
New Rescue!
This dog named Namche is currently being rescued by Temple Dog Rescue from the highest dog shelter in the world, in the town of Namche, along the Everest trekking route.
An American recently trekked through the town, and while she was there for days to acclimatize, she met this dog she named Namche after his birthplace. He was a street dog then.
The town of Namche recently removed all of its street dogs from the town and put them into a shetler.
Namche is there. Prakash is off to the rescue again to help us. He is in Kathmandu waiting for the weather to clear so he can get on the first flight to Lukla. At that time a jeep and driver will leave Kathmandu to drive to Lukla. It will take the jeep three days of driving, and Prakash three days of walking, up past 3000 meters in two days, and then one day down.
I found a driver who knows the local hand-carved roads and we can get a jeep up there, when others have said we cannot.
This dog is the luckiest. I am very excited to keep you guys posted on how we do on this rescue, because its going to be a logistical adventure.
Lots of love for the New Year.
Interesting facts about stray dogs in Kathmandu.
1. The alpha male will go without food so that a pregnant female of his own pack may eat.
2. Male dogs sometimes become the protectors of unrelated abandoned or lost puppies.
3. Packs live in well-defined territories. Where there is regular access to food they intermingle and cross boundaries with neighbouring packs, while also chasing away unknown interlopers moving through their territories.
4. Where there is less regular access to food packs defend their territories with more aggression and do no intermingle with other packs in cross-border relationships.
5. Dogs that are alone and are not part of a pack are most often females, that is a strategy to survive also, avoiding pregnancy and harassment learned from a young age. Females are less socialized than males, and unspayed females will sometimes have a male protector, a mate that fights off other males during heat.
6. I’ve never met a bad stray dog, they are the most grateful animals for kindness, affectionate, submissive and generally loyal.
7. Homeless dogs spend a lot of time with homeless people and they are accustomed to unpredictable behaviour. If you want to approach a stray dog, approach slowly with your hand under the chin. Do not attempt to pat a stray dog on the head. Move slowly towards its face under the chin, once you’ve made contact and the dog accepts you, you can then move to stroke it’s head.
Thank you to everyone who has been following my work with stray dogs in Kathmandu.
Seven more fur babies picked up today for spay.
Biting as a form of communication.
Did you know that dogs bite to communicate? A result of being without hands, is that dogs use their mouths for practically everything; eating, cooling, grooming, communicating and performing social control.
Packs dogs living in the swoayambhunath temple (the monkey temple) are fed at least once daily in the afternoons. It is the only regular food source they have, besides scavenging from garbage and hunting the occasional rat. They don't venture outside of the temple as there are other packs that keep dogs locked into specific roaming areas. They are challenged with bared teeth when they attempt to move outside of those areas, especially around feeding times.
Excitement increases when food is near. People come everyday to the temple with plastic buckets filled with warm rice that they distribute with ladles onto the ground for the animals. Generally, the animals get along, and there is no real danger of fighting within the same pack. I have even witnessed hungry alpha males give up their food for a pregnant female of the same pack, and none of her pack mates made any trouble when she received the bulk of food.
But occasionally, a pack in a fervour, might decide that one of its members is being too pushy, taking too much of its share, and they will attack that one dog in the group collectively.
The sound is terrible and frightening, because it appears as though the dog is being badly hurt, but it isn't, this is a form of social control, of biting that is meant to deter by pinching. A quick succession of bites that hurt, but not meant to be forceful enough to inflict any real lasting harm. Like boys in a fight.
You can see this form of biting between packs at feeding times, between individuals when one of them is resource guarding, and when a dog feels threatened or is becoming irritated with the attention of a well-meaning human or another animal.
The good news is that once a dog realizes it no longer has to compete for fo
