On Christmas Eve last year our biggest food donation ever left our warehouse to make a long journey all the way to Far North Queensland, just in time to beat the fast approaching wet season.
A couple of weeks earlier we had received a call from Helen from Three Clans Animal Health, a vet nurse who dedicates a huge amount of her time to educating and assisting remote indigenous communities with animal health, with a large emphasis on parasite control and desexing. Helen was concerned that some of the dogs in the region would not be able to source nutritious food in the coming months when roads are often cut off, and reached out to see if there was anything that we could do to help.
Helen explained that getting good dog food to these areas would not only help owners care for their animals but also help animal management workers and veterinary teams who work in these locations.
Large amounts of dog food is often used on a daily basis when animal management workers visit house-to-house. It is used to assist with the administration of anti-parasitic medications, improve trust for better animal handling, and to help carry out complete dog census data collection. Improved handling means that animals can be taken for de-sexing procedures and become easier to manage in the community environment.
In short; more food, better animal health, better human health, and improved environment.
We felt strongly that this was something that we wanted to assist with and our friends at Cairns Animal Rescue Inc were more than willing to help us make it happen! We were very proud to see our donation of 14 pallets, or 9,685kg of food delivered into Cooktown on Monday!
Now it's arrived the hard work begins for Helen and Cairns Animal Rescue, making sure it gets to the dogs that need it, all the way from Wujal Wujal in the South, right up to the Northern Peninsula Area of Cape York.
Getting such a large delivery to remote areas isn't easy and we have to give a big shoutout to the following people for helping along the way:
🔸Helen Bigmore @mistress_of_wolfhounds (Three Clans Animal Health)
🔸Cairns Animal Rescue Inc
🔸Northline for getting the food where it needed to go on time and helping us with the freight costs. Northline is an experienced, Australian owned and operated, global logistics business with an industry-leading national network and an international reach into more than 100 countries.
🔸Wellness Embodied Cairns for the use of their storage facilities in Cooktown whilst the team distribute around the Cape.
🔸Tuxworths for delivery, super speedy forklift driver and for the continued offer of help
🔸Wayne at Cooktown Hardware for local community distribution
🔸Tim and Veera at RESET Aurukun for helping with food distribution
🔸AusWaste Cooktown for offering to store and deliver
🔸Cooktown Cool Freezer Transport for the offer of a forklift
🔸Cook Shire Council
No doubt many more awesome people will be involved in this project along the way! We're looking forward to seeing dogs enjoying our food all around the Cape and will give you an update soon!
