About Us
According to WHO, there are more than 40 million stray dogs in China by 2021, taking more than 20% of total global stray animals. Over 50% pet dogs were abandoned in the first year by their owners without spay/neuter, they are starving and suffering from bad weathers, running across the street of lots of traffic, most of them will be "collected" by Animal Control and get euthanized after 12 days if no owner claim its ownership, even before they had a chance to be adopted by a new home.
This is not a new social problem, but the pet boom (https://bit.ly/chinapetboom)in China from 2018 has brought this issue to a new level. As policy makers are not able to come up with regulations on pet trading and stray rescuing, local communities' solution seems to be more problematic (https://bit.ly/straydogsinchina).
My name is Jill Zhang, a parent of 3 adopted dogs (one corgi, one collie and one border collie lab mix) . When I was waiting a bus at a bus stop, I saw a man put a box with 3 puppies at the stop and left without any message to the people around. That box is about 3 meters from me, with all those cute faces and barks, I believed I was needed to do something for them. Then I took these puppies back home and started to look for new homes for them from my wechat friends (Like facebook in China).
Luckily, 3 puppies found their new home shortly, but as more people know that I found home for puppies, more people came to ask me if I can help rescue and shelter those stray dog in their communities. This, is how I and Tom started out our journey with Pawft.
In Guangzhou, local animal control department will catch stray dogs and put them in a temprorary centralized shelter for 12 days, if there is no one claim ownership of the dog in 12 days, they will be euthanized. The time is so short that they even had no chance to meet their possible adopter. I believe there has to be a shelter for these stray dogs to live as long as they can to find their new home. But saving dogs is always easier said than done, I understood before we start this.
Now we have adopted more than 500 dogs in the past 2 years and found new home for 180+ of them. Shelter is a shelter, there are still more than 320 dogs waiting for a new home, although many of these dogs are likely to spend rest of their lives here in our shelter as their age and health condition.
We do not have a big team or beautiful office or even a decent website, most of the fund for the dogs come from our own salary, as more dogs taken in, we need more money from other sources to keep this shelter running.
Our mission here in Pawft is to help as many stray dogs as we can to find their new home. It's hard to give a specific number for mission given the difficulties and circumstances, but I will continue to do this as long as I can together with my team and supporters like you.
We have 4 member like-minded team with one thing in common which is passion for making this world a better place with less stray dogs.
Tom Tang, Co-founder. Tom is the first person who provide fanancial support to this program, who is also a dog lover who adopted 2 stray dogs from our shelter. his is in those groups that reporting stray dogs in the community and manage to bring them back to shelter and look for new homes for the dogs. He also helps us to raise money from other channels although it is been very difficult.
Yili Zhou, Operator - 3rd founder of the shelter, is a marketing professional who has worked with many top brands. Her job here is to organize volunteers to come to help and handles book keeping and sorts out the financial documents we need to make sure every penny spent at the right place.
Wang Ke Quan, Main Keeper - 55 year old retired engineer who has been hired to clean the shelter and feed dogs, sometimes he would do some his old job, like fixing the light bulb. :-) He is the man who stay at our shelter the most, we love him, just as much as the dogs in our shelter.
“We can not do great things—only small things with great love.”— MOTHER THERESA
Shelter Address: