05-12-09

Julie and two  of our Olderhills

One of our rescue centre's kennels

We want to link up special pets with special people and help them to be happy together.

We want to link up lost pets with their owners; and unwanted pets with new owners.

We also want to link up all animal welfare groups in SA to be more effective.

NEWS:-

December 2009: Julie and I are busy moving to a remote place in the mountains and have decided to stop the rescuing activities of Pet Link-up. The two of us alone can no longer cope with the workload of looking after hundreds of dogs waiting to be re-homed and the admin involved with achieving that. We had our first-ever holiday in 30 years last November and it gave us a taste of freedom! We will use our creativity to make lots of money and give it to other organizations like SAMAST, who concentrate on sterilizing pets, instead of doing it ourselves.

SO...please help us to get brilliant homes for those dogs still here who need homes. This has become urgent as we cannot take them with us.

OLD NEWS...

On  6th April Julie and I took part in a protest in front of the JHB magistrates court. We were supporting a friend who was being sued by a PET SHOP just because she said in a local newspaper 'Say "No" to Animals in Pet shops'. Her 2-year legal battle ended in victory when the pet shop settled and agreed to pay an amount of money to an animal charity.

Why do we say "no" to animals in pet shops? The biggest reason is the one Charlize Theron gives on the video clip made by PETA (see link below), and that is that puppy mills sell their puppies through pet shops, so buying puppies there keeps them in business. Where there is a demand there will be a supply.

 http://www.petatv.com/tvpopup/Prefs.asp?video=charlize-theron-pupply-mill

KUSA (the Kennel Union of Southern Africa) does not allow its members to sell puppies through pet shops.

Each puppy mill supplies THOUSANDS of puppies a year. In March this year we helped re-home 96 puppies -all born within 2 weeks of each other- who came from one puppy mill. These puppies were from 15 bitches. The farmer had about 300 bitches all having puppies twice a year. This is a potential total of 4000 puppies a year!

There is a puppy mill with 400 dogs that we know of.

There are PLENTY of other puppy mills here and they all sell their puppies through pet shops.

Help us to put an end to puppy mills. Start by saying "no" to animals in pet shops.

26/3/09: WARNING! DON'T DONATE ANY DOGS TO THE SOUTH AFRICAN POLICE! Read why here. The SAPS are trying to get more dogs from the public for 2010. Radio Jacaranda asked people what they thought and were surprised at the outcry on their blog (http://blog.jacarandafm.com/news/?p=1429#comments). People know what happens to dogs given to the police because of our website and other welfare groups' (including the SPCA) experience and disapproval of the police's policies towards  dogs.

9/3/09: We need urgent help please! We need foster homes where dogs can stay for a while until they find homes.

Julie and I cannot manage all the dogs that we have here (150-200) by ourselves and so they do not get attention. We just manage to feed, dip, and deworm them and take photos of new dogs, and occasionally work with some of the unsocialized doggies, but we can't give the dogs enough attention in between all the work. Dogs in a home environment will be much happier.

It will also be easier to find homes for them too.

Our centre is too far from town for many people's liking - even those in Pretoria. (We're 20 minutes north of Pretoria north.) If foster homes are spread all over the country then more people would have easy access to them.

09/09/08: Check out a hot new animal rights blog  www.deadwelfare.wordpress.com .

At the moment they are discussing the SPCA's illegal practice of euthanasing dogs the day that they are brought in, instead of waiting 7 days to find their owners (which in any case is a very short time). A Durban family's two bullterriers were killed the day the SPCA took them in. Other people are coming forward with similar stories. Read more about it and add your own stories if you have any.

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ONGOING CAMPAIGN! PLEASE READ ABOUT PETS BEING SKINNED ALIVE ON OUR PROJECTS PAGE.

We sterilized 40 feral cats at a factory in Rosslyn, Pretoria.  Read about the project here.

We and our pets need each other physically, emotionally and spiritually. (Pets can even tell psychics what medication their owners take!) Look at our psychic pet page to hear some amazing stories.

Who are we?

Pet Link-up is run by two of us - Susan and Julie.  (Check out our website www.olderhill.co.za if you'd like to see us and our own dogs!)

Over the last 15 years  we have sterilized, vaccinated (and given other veterinary treatment where necessary), trained and re-housed thousands of dogs (and several cats, pigs and horses) at our own expense. There are quite a few groups like us in South Africa who sterilize and re-home pets using their own money. (There are ladies who spend all of their spare time - often right through the night - catching feral cats and sterilizing them. We take our hats off to them for their dedication.)

We registered as a charitable trust at the beginning of 2005 hoping to get donations to sterilize dogs and cats on a big scale. It's the only way to end the unnecessary slaughter of hundreds of thousands of unwanted dogs and cats every year at our SPCAs. (Nearly 6000 a MONTH in Johannesburg alone!) It's the only intelligent solution. Also to vaccinate them. Only about 1 out of 10 million dogs here in SA are vaccinated. This is why distemper kills thousands of dogs here every year. (In the USA 80 million dogs are vaccinated annually and distemper is virtually unknown.)

Up to now we have only had a handful of donations, and so still only use our own money, but we have been very fortunate in receiving a regular donation of dog food for the last year, which has helped us tremendously with the dogs we look after at our centre. We are very grateful to the donor, who wishes to remain anonymous.

So it seems at the moment that we are destined to be the sole sponsors of our charity! Seeing that we have big dreams of solving the whole world's animal welfare problems (ending the mass euthanasia of unwanted pets in cities; ending the mass cruelty towards animals killed for their fur or flesh, or tortured either in pointless experiments or for their bile) that means that we are going to have to become incredibly rich and inventive to achieve them. Which we intend to do.

Our first step is to finish the book and DVD on understanding dogs and training that we have started. Many people have been waiting a long time for this because we happen to be good trainers - especially having trained literally thousands of dogs to be re-homed - and have plenty of experience undoing BAD training that has damaged some of the dogs we've got in (especially from the SA police). We've learnt to teach a dog basic obedience in 20 minutes! And tracking with dogs who are not even lead-trained in the same time! We will put a notice at the top of this page (in BIG letters - flashing if we know how to do that!) when our book and DVD are available. It will really help all dog owners to understand, appreciate and have an even better relationship with their dogs. It will save many lives if people take what we say about certain breeds seriously.

We will then write other books and make films because we have lots of things we want to show people. Not only about animals. Julie and I are both advocates and have some juicy stories about our courts and legal system. And other countries' too. We live in South Africa and have just as juicy stories about our society where you could be considered  reckless and living on the edge if you go shopping more than absolutely necessary! (There are shoot-outs at shopping malls almost on a weekly basis here.)

If you just can't wait for us to get rich to sterilize lots of dogs and cats, then please make a donation into our account that is exclusively for sterilizing and vaccinating dogs and cats that would otherwise not be done because their owners can't afford it. Once we get donations we will publish the bank statement on this site so that donors can see their payment and that it has been paid to a vet to sterilize and vaccinate a dog or cat in a poor area. Our donations page has our banking details.