With this project we are gaining a foothold in the lives of dogs that do not belong to us. Simply taking a dog off the chain would mean putting

another dog on the same chain to suffer the same bitter fate. After all, the owners think they have to keep a dog on their property.

After signing a contract with the dog's owner, a procedure often requiring lengthy negotiations, we install a 50 to 70 square metre "refuge" (a fenced area with a double-walled, insulated kennel and a viewing platform). The contract includes the right to inspect the dog and the refuge at any time and without prior notice.

Since the start of this programme in 1996, we have installed 726 of these refuges. Today we have 306 dogs housed in 280 refuges within a 75 km radius of Fallada.

Our monthly costs are € 10.090. Of this amount, € 2,200 goes on salaries (our inspector and our "dogfood man"), € 800 on food, € 1,050 for fuel, about € 5.800 for medication and veterinary and €240 € on regular maintenance. We receive € 3,375 per month in "star money" donations.

Our bond with dogs reaches back to the beginning of human history. Sometimes it has been a marriage of convenience; others, a loving partnership. We humans have swung back and forth between appreciation for the other species and cruel exploitation, muzzling and torture. By domesticating Canis lupus familiaris we discovered and developed an unusually deep relationship with another species. At the same time, we also took advantage of these vulnerable creatures we had come across "by chance". Dear Friends of Pro Animale, when you look at the scenes shown here, you cannot help but be moved by the ways other species have been raped by humans. In many parts of the world, these scenes are a part of everyday life. Not so long ago, they were regarded as quite normal and acceptable in Germany, too. How is it possible that companions and friends of humanity, highly praised since time immemorial, are still enslaved, humiliated and oppressed both emotionally and physically? A chained animal is overwhelmed by primary emotions like stress and fear and subsequent secondary emotions such as despair and apathy. It is totally unable to comprehend or cope with the deprivations it experiences. A dog lives and suffers in the here and now. We can only imagine the suffering experienced by a creature that cannot reflect on the injustice, punishment and torture that have been imposed on it.

This is what Johanna Wothke wrote in "DER TROPFEN" in 1997:

"I remember it was winter 1996, at the beginning of our journey to the Polish chain dogs… it had already snowed, and it was cold and gloomy and wet. We entered a farm and negotiated with a farmer who finally agreed to take us to his chain dog and its desolate dwelling – a small, red, empty feeding bowl, overturned, a chain frozen into the ground – it ended at the neck of a black dog whose head hung unnaturally out of its squalid kennel. The man poked the dog's head with his boot – the dog had stopped moving. So he had died – a lifelong slave, like countless fellow-sufferers before and after him. A victim to man, the slave owner."

Such animals feel physical deprivation, hunger, cold, unbearable heat, pain because they cannot run about – a physical need for dogs – and pain from physical ailments. Even more, they are afraid: afraid of what may lie ahead, afraid of ominous footsteps, afraid of unbearable weather and no escape from it. They feel an isolation they cannot comprehend, an isolation from all essential social interaction, both with members of their own species and with us humans on whom dogs have depended since they were first domesticated.