Our mission & goal

Our work consists in to take in and help lost, abandoned and ill-treated dogs. We have usually between 80 and 100 dogs in our care and it gets especially crowded before and after the holidays when many dogs are abandoned. During the last year, also always more dogs are abandoned because of the actual economic crisis.

It is important that you know that we are not a city run Animal Shelter where - after a certain length of time - unclaimed or unwanted animals are put to sleep and thrown away. Our goal is to ensure that all our animals find a new home even if it takes a long time. This means that we sometimes have „long term guests“ which need to stay with us for health reasons or to re-adjust themselves to a kinder life surrounded by caring people. These dogs also deserve the chance of finding a home.

Our costs depend on the number of dogs and are covered by public subsidies of Denia's Town hall as well as particular donations and, in minor measures, by associates' quotas.The last four years, APAD's activity has been consolidated and even has become more professional given the great demand of the public service that we realize. So that APAD has signed several agreements with Denia's Town hall about economic subsidy (still outstanding for 2009) and improvement of facilities (finished in April 2010) as well as about withdrawal of dogs within Denia.

Today, as a result of this fast progression, APAD has 6 permanent employees at its disposal who work in two shifts (in the morning and in the afternoon) from Monday until Friday and at the weekend the work is covered by some employees and volunteers. 

The daily animal care entails a complete range of duties such as looking after puppies, checking on ill or injured animals in our care, taking dogs to the veterinarian, giving medicine, dog walking, cleaning the dog runs and kennels, and maintaining the grounds. We also have work outside of the animal rescue shelter such as finding sponsors, organizing fiesta days and fundraisers, press releases, information presentations to be made at schools, contact with authorities and other animal rescue organizations etc.

APAD also realizes punctually the rescue of autochthonous animals, in the photo a royal owl, which was gathered in Denia and after checking our veterinarian his condition of malnutrition, it was delivered to the SEPRONA (Protection service of the Nature) of the Guardia Civil for his admission in a specialized centre in Alicante

FURTHER GOALS

One of our most important goals is to bring a better understanding of animal welfare to the general public. Our plan is to bring this subject to the forefront with information and an education campaign which will be delivered to schools, this way children and teenagers will learn to be accountable for the proper manner in which animals should be kept and cared for.

ECONOMIC SITUATION

As charitable organization our main task is to find so many responsible families as possible which adopt our dogs. This work presupposes the existence of financial resources which get less and less. Actually (May 2010), the financial situation of APAD is critical.

To rehabilitate our accounts and be able to work further, the payment of the outstanding financial helps on part of the town hall Denia was applied repeatedly.

Apart of the current economic crisis –which is reflected in our sector in less adoptions and more abandoned dogs-, APAD is exposed to the abuse through adjacent municipalities whose citizens bring dogs picked up in these municipalities to the animal home Denia. These adjacent municipalities proceed illegally according to the law 4/94, article 17 + 18 of the Generalitat Valenciana. And their citizens ask a service of APAD -the taking of dogs found in these illegally acting town halls- which we cannot render. The result within the whole chaos is that APAD houses dogs from other municipalities and must spend thousands of Euro (which aren't available) for their maintenance and care –according to the law- so that at least this will end with the financial disaster of APAD.

These municipal administrations claim to have no means to render a comparable service, although they present budgets of several millions of Euro.

The citizens have the last word…