Moving to Paradise — Giving Back
Over the last few months I have been volunteering at several animal sanctuaries on the island, these are my experiences.
Back in the UK, during the hight of the pandemic, I started volunteering with a local charity who were collecting food outside supermarkets for food parcels. I really enjoyed this and it made me want to search out something similar here.
You do have to be a little careful here with volunteer work as a non resident. Apparently the rules are quite strict and you do not want to end up in trouble for doing something that you thought was helping. You cannot do any unpaid job that a local could potentially get paid to do — fair enough if this is a paying business who are just being cheap, but there are a lot of charities out there who desperately need skilled people to help with various activities eg event planning, fundraising etc and that is where it can get a bit muddy. To be on the safe side, I decided to join a friend who visited an animal sanctuary on a weekly basis to walk the dogs and generally socialise the animals there. I don’t think anyone would call that something that could be a paid job.
Barbados has quite a few animal sanctuaries, mostly with dogs but some also with cats. People do keep dogs here, but many are treated just as guard animals and left to live outside in the yard, they are also not often neutered so there are a lot of unwanted puppies around. This is where the sanctuaries come in. They are full to bursting with abandoned puppies, dogs and cats, it really is very sad.
The shelters rely on donations and volunteers to keep the animals housed and fed, but they also need people to come and interact with them to get them used to being with people and give them more of a chance at adoption. Of course the puppies tend to go first as they are so cute, but there are so many lovely natured animals that need homes.
Ocean Acres is a large sanctuary on the West Coast and has dogs and cats (and a few turtles!). The setting here is beautiful but they have a lot of animals so it is hard to get around to everyone. I love spending time with the cats, I really am a cat person and I came out covered in fur!
The Ark is slightly closer to us and so we have been going there recently. They have around 25 dogs, although that number has just increased by 10 with the addition of Sally’s puppies. I have totally fallen in love with Peppy (I would rather call him Grogu after Baby Yoda) but sadly Carl is allergic to dogs and cats so no puppies for me :(
Every so often the shelters are able to send small dogs off to Canada to be re-homed up there, but there is a very strict size limit with them needing to fit under a seat, which means this cannot happen for most dogs.
If you are reading this from Barbados and are keen to get involved, just get in touch with the sanctuaries to arrange a time to go along, and in general, if you are looking for a pet, please consider rescues rather than breeders.
