Janice and Liz attended this years International Companion Animal Welfare Conference (ICAWC) in Ljubljana, Slovenia from 24th - 28th October 2006. (I just want to point out first of all, that money did not come out of the Sri Lanka funds to pay for this event). Thank you to The Dogs Trust and North Shore Animal League International for organising the event. The event was attended by animal welfare groups from all over the world.
There were many things to learn from the workshops and speakers such as Luke Gamble MRCVS from the Worldwide Veterinary Service, Adrian Burder from the Dogs Trust who spoke about using the internet as a promotional tool, Shauna Lowry who has many shows on the BBC and Animal Planet, Sarah Fisher on TTouch, and an inspirational talk from Heather Mills about her campaign against the horrific dog and cat fur trade in China.
Everyone was given a chance to talk to members of other groups and promote the work of their group. Hopefully it will enable everyone to work closer together in the future and spread the word of animal suffering onto a global scale.
We were very grateful to recieve items from a group called S.N.I.P. A cat trap, long protection glove, cat handler and piece of vet bed were given. The cat trap will hopefully prove very useful. The cats in Sri Lanka are often hard to catch and to handle. On the summer trip alone two cats were seen with severe cancer that had eaten away parts of their face/ears. We were unable to catch and help them as we did not have the right equipment. Thank you very much to S.N.I.P. we are very grateful. This will also enable us to neuter and spay many more cats in the future.
Slovenia is a beautiful country, we did have a chance to have a look round Ljubljana and find out some of the history, we also had a short trip to a local animal rescue shelter. It was a worthwile trip and hopefully HAAAW volunteers will be able to go to future conferences to keep Sri Lanka on the map.
