Ukraine's animal rights organization launches animal blood donor platform
Ukraine's animal rights organization UAnimals starts another initiative to support animal blood banks.
What is the problem?
Russia's war injured thousands of Ukrainians, which brought up human blood donations. However, animals suffer no less from diseases and war outcomes. Many pets can get infections, poisoning, experience surgeries, or mine blast injuries. In some cases, a blood transfusion can save the animals from worse outcomes. Finding a donor for a cat or dog quickly is not an easy task in Ukraine.
What is the solution?
Ukrainian animal protection organization UAnimals has launched a platform where pet owners can request blood donors or add their pets to a database so that they can be donors for other animals.
How does it work?
We decided to launch the platform, as we know that blood transfusion is the only chance to save an animal's life. Transfusions are indispensable after injuries, poisoning, and infectious diseases. We will contact those who need a blood donor for their animal and those who are ready to include their animal in our campaigns, UAnimals state.
The initiative aims to get potential supporters to get to know and help each other. The platform will be used solely to find the right contacts for donors and recipients.
Further communication and all medical procedures related to donation will be organized by people on their own, communicating directly offline. The responsibility for this communication remains with the parties involved, the project founders say.
One can take part in the donation for free, the organization states.
The UAnimals initiative is definitely useful and necessary, says a vet from Kyiv Victoria Sherstiuk.
In most cases it is the only way to save the animal. Any blood loss, linked to injuries, such as falling from a height, large blood loss due to debris is very important during the war. If the animal receives no donation, it has a 50% chance of survival, but the actual help increases the chance of survival to 80-90%, she added.
The vet from Kyiv, Victoria Sherstiuk
Victoria notes the platform disperses the search for donors by region. Most owners will not bring their pets to completely another city to reach animal blood banks. However, the issue persists in smaller towns or villages, so people should travel to the nearest big town.
It is not risky to transfuse blood. Such a procedure will not harm a healthy animal. My 14-year-old dog has been a blood donor at least 20 times during its life. Its health condition didn't get worse at all afterwards and felt just great. The only thing that needs to be done after the blood sampling is to slightly increase the animal's diet. The fear of making your animal a donor is just a fear, Victoria concluded.
Veterinary medicine has been developing very rapidly over the past ten years, assures Volodymyr Kishchuk, a veterinarian from Kyiv, who runs the "Your Vet" Facebook page.
Thanks to international knowledge, we have a lot of highly specialized veterinarians. Ways of treatment are changing, new diagnoses are being made. Thanks to blood donation, it is possible to prolong the life of an animal even when there seemed to be no chance. For some owners, it is very important to win a few weeks, months or years, Volodymyr said.
