KARACHI: Five little four-day-old kittens were found roaming about in the Dawn offices a couple of weeks ago with no sign of their mother anywhere. And when she didn’t appear by midnight, the mention of the Edhi Animal shelter came up.

The shelter is just off the Superhighway after passing Toll Plaza on a big piece of land where donkeys, cats, dogs, eagles and kites live in harmony.

All have been rescued from once place or another. There is a cat with a cracked skull, who was left to die by someone on the roadside, another has an injured paw while the others, too, with some problem or the other get good medical care and attention by a very well-trained staff. The tiny kittens, too, found a foster mother at the shelter. When they were put in the basket with the others their size, even the cat who adopted them couldn’t tell them apart from her own. Kittens of that size can either be fed baby formula through a dropper or nursed by another cat. The kittens were lucky.

The Edhi Animal shelter has been managed by the Ayesha Chundrigar Foundation since March 2013. “I have always loved animals. I cannot see them suffering. Even as a child I used to rescue chicks, goats, cats and dogs and bring them home. It is really sad how stray animals are treated on the streets here. Left on their own they have no hope. And all I wanted to do was to give the voiceless a voice,” says Ayesha Chundrigar, a humanitarian and journalist by profession.

Donkeys unable to work due to a bad hoof condition and stray dogs end up the best of friends at the shelter.

Since the age of nine, Ayesha has been volunteering at orphanages, katchi abadi schools, institutes for the disabled, etc, every summer during her vacations and on weekends. After the 2005 earthquake when she was a student in Islamabad, she would help around at the refugee camps, play with the children there and teach them arts and crafts.

Then after returning in 2012 from England, where she studied and worked for six years, Ayesha was one day heading somewhere in Karachi when she noticed a donkey, whose leg had been cut, in severe agony. “I had to stop and help immediately. That’s when I found out from a guard nearby that the poor animal had been that way for days. Looking for someone to help the animal I came across a board of a veterinarian. His name was Dr Khalid Memon and I found him to be a most kind man,” Ayesha says.

Rescued animals at the shelter get to enjoy imported canned food.

Today Dr Memon serves as the senior vet at the animal shelter. “We also have a junior vet, Ghulam Fareed, there and shelter manager Salman Wali, who is studying to be a vet and is in his third year of veterinary medicine right now. They are the most dedicated people and have even worked for free at the shelter because at first I didn’t have the funds even to pay them,” she says.

“Of course, now as people get to know of our work, the donations are coming in. And my team of vets with their first-aid kits are ready for any emergency as always. They even go out in the middle of the night if we get information about an animal that needs to be saved. The Edhi Foundation, too, has dedicated ambulances for helping animals,” she says.

New arrivals, the little newborn kittens being welcomed at the shelter.

About how her foundation got to run the Edhi Animal shelter, Ayesha says she had heard about it by word of mouth. “I found out that the Edhi Foundation had this big land where they wanted to help animals but weren’t sure how to go about it. That’s when I just dropped in at their office and met Edhi Foundation’s spokesman Anwar Kazmi Sahib. I explained to him that I was interested in running an animal shelter but was short on resources and asked him if I could see the place. On seeing it I just knew I had to help the animals there who were hungry for love and attention besides medical care. That’s when the Ayesha Chundrigar Foundation joined hands with the Edhi Foundation,” she says.

Ayesha feeds all animals at the shelter canned food and dry animal food. “Earlier my staff used to go to the market every day to buy meat for them. There is no electricity or gas at the shelter though we have solar panels to run the water pump. So we had to cook the meals using a gas cylinder. But then we decided to get them canned food and dried food which is more feasible and less time-consuming as well as our staff now has more time to care for and rescue animals instead of cooking meals for them,” she says.

Published in Dawn, July 27th, 2014