Granada Animal Rescue Follow Up

First, thank you all so much for your generous responses to this post, where I asked for help naming Elena Salpee’s animal rescue here in Granada. She loved all the names, as did I.

The one she chose was: “Animals Love Living.”

I made a temporary logo, (but have not signed up for the one year fee yet to pay for the logo service. I just took a photo of the draft, for now. )

Elena blessed me with Rafa and Alex, one year ago, and as I got to know her, I heard her stories, and learned a few things about the culture of animal rescue here in Andalucía.

Elena, sometimes alone, sometimes with a friend, just answers calls, goes out, day and night, and retrieves abandoned animals, abused animals, and animals who have been sometimes left trapped inside summer properties and in various other situations. She jumps fences, walls, and waits beneath trees all night (as was the case with Alex.) She’s been attacked, and even beaten up, in the process of intervening on behalf of these animals, sometimes in rough places.

She has a vet who works pro-bono, or for very little, and often, her rescued animals show signs of abuse. She has seen things I will choose not to describe; She simply never gives up, makes sure she does all she can for each animal— posting on FB, arranging for fostering and finding homes for Granada’s most needy animals. Apparently they have very few stray cats in Barcelona, so some wind up getting adopted up there.

She told me the bigger, international rescue groups, often foreigners, have cornered the donations, and that bothered me. She even goes as far as to seek criminal convictions for abused animals if she locates the perpetrators.

Once she even, as I described in the previous post, gotten a meeting with the mayor of Granada, to try to get some laws changed.

She herself has taken in something like 15 cats (not exactly sure the number,) operates on zero budget, and simply does this out of the purity of her heart. I think she is between jobs right now, and I feel her true calling is to earn enough from international donations that she could start her own professional organization.

I made a first donation of $125, via her Paypal address, and would like to ask if anybody here would consider a donation of any size, even a few dollars.

I also asked if she would want to share some of her stories, and post animals up for adoption. For this we will need a new Substack, and my son Jeremy has agreed to set it up, and link it to her bank account. We hope to get this rolling next week.

If anybody wishes to make a donation, this is her PayPal address. (Right now, we only have PayPal:)

As I was looking over her FB page, I found photos of literally Rafa! (The orange kitten.) Rafa’s mother got stuck by a car and he was the last of the litter not to be placed.

Here she is with some other friends, feeding a colony:

I know people are struggling, and please don’t feel bad if you can’t donate. But my thought was that tiny rescue operations need more grassroots support, and in this case, I can personally vouch for that every dollar goes toward saving lives, and nothing for corporate overhead.

I have horror stories about so called rescue groups in NYC, who took money based on how many cats they moved out the door alive. But once I took two adult cats from them who were so sick they could barely move, and I wound up having to take them to ER, only to be screamed at by these people. I was later told such cats are called “hot potatoes” and they are kept barely alive under horrific conditions, (to bring in the money, from the city) while animal lovers are shown photos of them on social media, and told they will be euthanized within hours if nobody takes them. It’s a cynical racket! I am still traumatized by the memory of especially one of those cats.

In journalism as in animal rescue, I believe in small fish, not big fancy corporate outfits, who often are corrupt and care nothing for animals.

I could not do what Elena does.