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KAROO ANIMALS - Weekend Argus 05/05/07

THE Little Karoo, a couple of hours' drive from Cape Town, attracts thousands of tourists who flock there for the wonderful mountain scenery and the serene atmosphere of the fruit and wine farms enfolded in its broad valleys. But a Barrydale woman found, away from the tourist routes, terrible suffering among farm and domestic animals. This is the unique and controversial way in which she dealt with it.

When Colette Teale drives her Karoo Animal Protection Society (KAPS) vehicle anywhere through the sprawling coloured settlements outside the towns of the Little Karoo, the dogs recognise it --- and they come running. When she stops and gets out, they jump up to be petted and stroked. "Some of them want the food I usually bring, but what they really want is love and attention," she says.

And when she walks into the living room of her farmhouse, 8km from Barrydale, she is greeted by barks and yelps of excitement. At any one time, up to 30 dogs could be sharing her home, all of them rescued from intolerably cruel situations on farms and in poverty-stricken settlements of the Little Karoo. As paid-up members of the family, they are learning to socialise with people and with other dogs. Once they show they are ready for it, they are rehomed. In the three months before our visit, Teale had rehomed 63 dogs.

Teale's rehoming procedure is unique and, in some circles, controversial. She believes that dogs that have spent weeks or months in kennels in the more usual animal-rescue set-up have been de-socialised. "People who get a dog from a caged environment don't know what they are getting,"she says. "They don't know whether the animal is house-trained – and by that I don't mean just toilet-trained. The most affable animal could turn vicious or unsociable after an unhappy, unnatural life in a cage."

Before rehoming a dog, Teale rigorously cross-questions the prospective new owner. She will not rehome a dog in a house where there are small children ("I won't take a chance on a kid getting bitten if it teases a strange dog") and the dog must sleep in the house, as one of the family. "Animals, particularly dogs, need to know that they are loved and trusted. I think all our dogs are happy."

They seem happy. The dogs have free run of the house and grounds: there is not a kennel on the place, although there are travelling cages in the back of the KAPS van for animals that are too restless for safety. Each dog has its own basket or blanket or cushion. Some of the smaller dogs share their baskets if they're good mixers, but any dog that prefers to be alone can see off intruders. Rufus, a pony-sized Bouvier de Flandres, rumbles threateningly if any other dog sets paw on his pad. There are seldom fights: but when Teale is away from the farm, even for a few hours, a minder is left in charge.

Teale, with her husband Percy, moved permanently to to the Barrydale farm in 2000. They met on St Helena, the mid-Atlantic island where Percy headed the public works department for several years. At first, she tried desperately to get help for the emaciated and diseased dogs, horses and donkeys that she found chained up or confined in small enclosures without shelter from the killing Little Karoo sun.

"People drive along Route 62 admiring the wine and fruit farms and the fantastic mountain passes ," she says. "The area is geared for tourism: every few kilometres there is a pub or a restaurant or a craft shop, but the people who go there don't see the terrible suffering away from the tourist routes."

She approached several animal welfare organisations, but they were all too busy or too under-funded or too under-staffed to help, although she acknowledges that they did, and do, their best under very difficult circumstances.

"So I got stuck in on my own, with Percy's help and support. KAPS was started in 2001 and registered as a non-profit organisation the following year. We soon built up a network of volunteer helpers, and we have been fortunate in getting good co-operation from the local SPCA branches. On the whole, Little Karoo farmers are not animal lovers, although we now get active help from a few individuals. We have worked hard at persuading them to ensure that all the animals on their farms are well treated, including the animals that belong to their workers, and I'm happy to say that we have had some success.

"But the real problems are not on the farms, they are in the huge settlements of desperately poor people outside the towns. We have been criticised for caring more about the animals than about the people. My response is that there are many organisations, at all levels of government, that care for the people, but until we started here nothing was done for the animals.

"We started in the Barrydale district and in Suurbraak, a big housing scheme near Swellendam. I did house-to-house checks and found that most of the dogs were infested with worms or were suffering from mange, a very infectious skin disease that can be transmitted to people. I also found that very few people had their dogs sterilised, because they made extra money by selling puppies. I started dipping and deworming clinics, using dip generously donated by the SPCA.

"By early 2003, KAPS was running regular clinics as far afield as Ladismith, Calitzdorp, Riversdale and Albertinia. We started work recently in Voorbaat, a farming area in the Kannaland municipality. At first we paid for all the medication (including deworming tablets at R10 a time). Now the Kyron Laboratories have donated dewormers and other valuable medical products, some of which have to be administered by the vets or the registered SPCA inspectors who work with us. "

KAPS is managed and staffed entirely by volunteers and all its services are free to the poor. People in the settlements are coming to accept that their dogs should be sterilised and should be seen by a vet if they are sick. Word has got around that animals taken to the clinics are sterilised and treated at no charge to their owners.

"We are grateful to the local vets who co-operate with us in doing this," says Teale. "KAPS pays all the vet fees. We can't expect people who don't have enough to live on to pay vet fees. But I think we're getting the message across. When I drive around the settlements, I see healthy animals."

Initially, Teale was the only field worker. She drove thousands of kilometres every month in her 30-year-old Kombi, but eventually it gave up the ghost. Off the main routes, driving in the Little Karoo challenges even experienced rally drivers: winding between weird rock formations tinged with sulphurous yellow or ferrous red, the roads are strewn with boulders, precipitous in places and maintained sporadically only by land-owners.

KAPS now has a suitable van (a Toyota Stallion) donated by the Marchig Animal Welfare Trust, but a back-up vehicle is urgently neeeded to help cope with the punishing terrain.

We spent a day with Teale as she made a 200km round trip to check recently sterilised animals in settlements around Barrydale, Ladismith, and Amalienstein, a former mission village. People recognised the big white van with its prominent purple-and-white KAPS logo: they waved greetings and we heard their comments – "Dis die honde mense" or "Dis die hondevrou" ("It's the dog people" or "It's the dog woman").

By now, Teale knows her way around the settlements: if she is ever at a loss, hordes of children point the way. At the first house, Teale walked up to a big brown dog lying on the front stoep. It tail-wagged a welcome, then submitted calmly as she removed stitches from the sterilisation wound. There was no water bowl, and the woman of the house said that if the dog wanted to drink , it went to the dam.

"Two streets away and across a main road," said Teale. "Not good enough." The woman fetched a bowl of water and set it on the stoep, "There's just so much I can do," said Teale. "Tomorrow, the dog will go to the dam to drink".

The most sensitive part of Teale's work is dealing with people who ill-treat or starve their animals. The law allows her to remove an ill-treated animal, usually after a warning. We watched as she got out of the van at a house where a watch-dog, a Staffordshire cross, was on a short, 2m chain, with no shelter from the sun and no water within reach.

She strode towards the dog and released it from the chain. It gambolled away, to join other dogs that were running loose in the yard. Teale called the householder and ticked her off comprehensively. "I've warned her before that the dog must be on a running chain, that it must have shade and that it must have water within reach," she said. "Now I've told her that the dog will be removed if I find it chained like that again."

In another settlement, a group of teenagers waved the van down and Teale got out to talk to them. She came back white with rage. They had told her that a man had beaten his dog to death because it stole something. We drove to a nearby fruit farm where he was employed and she spoke to the manager. The alleged dog-killer was called in by radio and Teale told him she was going to lay a charge of animal cruelty against him. He glared at her but said nothing. On the way home, she called at the police station and laid the charge.

Had she ever considered, we asked, that she could be putting herself into considerable danger by removing peoples' animals and taking them to court? "By now, the community supports me -- otherwise those young people would not have told me about the dog being killed -- and witnesses are prepared to give evidence. If things get nasty, I back off for the moment – but I go back with an an SPCA inspector or with the police. The SPCA inspector I work with a great deal is a big guy and he can be pretty intimidating. All the same, the two of us were once threatened by a group of men with pitchforks.

"But I absolutely will not back down because of threats. The police have to enforce the law and they have helped me more than once. On one occasion the Barrydale station commander himself came with me to remove an ill-treated horse."

One of KAPS' biggest problems is that cases take at least twelve months to get to court. Once in court, accused who are first offenders get suspended sentences, apparently in line with the department of justice's gudelines to magistrates. However, Teale and her hard-working team feel that the communities of the Little Karoo are, finally, learning from experience and example to treat their animals humanely.

KAPS main financial support comes from individual members of the society. However in the last two years it has also had support from the Marchig Trust, the Society for the Protection of Animals Abroad (SPANA), the Dangwen Trust, Beauty Without Cruelty, and has had a Lotto grant. Animal care products have been donated by Kyron Laboratories, Hill's Pet Nutrition and Pulvex flea and tick products.

For more information and to support KAPS in its mission to help animals in poor communities, contact Colette Teale 028 572 1717 or 072 277 1056 or P O Box 134, Barrydale 6750.