CHAI Celebrates Its 25th Anniversary

Over Two Decades of Helping Israel's Animals

CHAI marks its 25th anniversary of sowing seeds of compassion throughout the country, made possible by your support.

From our inception, we struggled to fulfill each request as it came in: an autoclave for sterilizing surgical instruments to one shelter, an anesthesia machine, educational videos and materials to another, surgical instruments and tranquilizers to a third, humane dog and cat traps to a fourth, and to a fifth, a large newspaper ad asking for donations for a desperately needed roof before the arrival of winter rains. Whatever the need, CHAI was there. Above all, one shelter Director told us, CHAI showed them that people saw their terrible situation and cared, offering desperately needed hope that things would change for the better.

The fruits of our efforts were videos we sent shown on Israeli TV, educating thousands around the country, spay/neuter surgeries made possible at two shelters by equipment we sent, several new shelters launched, and a new roof for a shelter built, providing dozens of dogs protection from cold winter rains.

Our Israeli sister charity, Hakol Chai, was established in 2001.

Our first year: CHAI and the Education Ministry co-sponsored Israel's first nationwide Humane Education Contest

CHAI has always believed that education is the key to positive change, as it goes to the root of the problem, and so in our first year, we co-sponsored, with Israel's Ministry of Education, the first country-wide Humane Education Contest.

A committee of Education Ministry officials judged actions to help animals and compositions submitted by students throughout the country. At the formal award ceremony in Ramat Gan, the Minister of Education awarded prizes to individual students and classes of students who had done the most to help animals or who had written the best compositions about the right attitude toward animals. For the first time, high-level government officials held up compassion for animals as an ideal for students to emulate. Response to the contest was so positive that the Ministry continued it for many years afterwards, calling it "The Love of Animals."

Winning compositions were displayed at the Ministry, one table per grade level.
Classes and individuals who won were bused to the award ceremony.

Year after year, your loyal support made it possible for us to respond when and where help was most needed.

Thanks to you, we:

• Participated in the process of drafting the country's first Animal Protection Law.
   

• Campaigned successfully to put donated ambulances for animals on the same tax and customs duty-free basis as ambulances donated to human hospitals, and we donated the first ambulance in Israel to a shelter.

CHAI's animal ambulance,
the first in Israel

• Co-sponsored professional conferences with government ministries in Israel to raise awareness about animal issues, teach proper shelter management, and replace the cruel mass strychnine poisonings with humane methods of animal control.
   

• Co-sponsored, with the Ministry of Education, a conference on the link between violence toward people and toward animals and the importance of humane education, which led the Knesset Education Committee to acknowledge the need to include humane education in the school curriculum.

Professional conferences

• Shipped the first mobile spay/neuter clinic in the Middle East to Israel, performed operations from one end of the country to the other, and taught and demonstrated the importance of early-age spaying and neutering.

Our mobile spay/neuter clinic

• Exposed the routine cruelty to cart horses, pressing Mayors throughout the county to end the abuse, and rescued and rehabilitated as many horses as we could.

Left: Rescued and rehabilitated horses.    Right: Starving cart horse.

Left: Event in Tel Aviv in support of a ban on horse-drawn carts.
Right: Poster campaign, "Horses and donkeys are not trucks!"

• Campaigned to block the establishment of the horseracing industry in Israel.

Left: Horse and jockey at "practice" race, Photo: Eli Atias for Hakol Chai.
Right: Anti-racing demonstration.

• Provided a lifeline in times of crisis during the Disengagement in Gaza and the West Bank, and rushed truckloads of food, hundreds of water bowls, and teams of volunteers to the north during the war with Hezbollah in Lebanon, then housed and cared for the animals and found them homes, saving hundreds of lives.

Left: In Gaza, our mobile clinic travelled through evacuated areas, rescuing the
animals left behind. Right: On the West Bank, a helpful soldier brings a cat to the clinic.

The war with Hezbollah in Lebanon. Rushing 12 tons of food and hundreds of
bowls of water to abandoned animals. Photos: Avi Hirschfield for Hakol Chai.

• Developed an extensive, trilingual website (English, Hebrew, and Arabic) that provides comprehensive information for animal advocates, researchers, students, and others around the world.

And so much more.

Whether it is your small contributions combined, special gifts, or bequests that made possible the ambulance, enabled us to purchase, ship, and operate the spay/neuter clinic, to build a new cat facility for a shelter, to create an extensive humane education curriculum for secular and Jewish schools and so much more – all was made possible by YOU. Read more about CHAI's accomplishments.

Please join us for another decade of progress for the animals.

CHAI's mobile spay/neuter clinic provided low-cost operations and education throughout the country and earned a reputation for professionalism and compassionate care of animals. Thanks to a bequest from a CHAI member, the clinic — whose work we had to temporarily curtail due to the economic situation — will soon be back in service. Being able to alter animals at a very low cost is even more critical in difficult economic times, preventing abandonment and euthanasia of many animals. A contribution of $26 will help subsidize one spay or neuter; $260 will underwrite 10 surgeries. Please help us keep this vital service going into the future. Send your generous tax-deductible contributions to CHAI.

Please also contribute to our campaign to prevent gambling on horse racing, a cruel industry based on greed, from entering Israel. A professional lobbyist is expensive, as much as $25,000 per year. For information about the cruelties in this industry, see Horse Racing — the Horror Behind the Glamour.

The clinic, our extensive educational curriculum for secular and Jewish schools, and many of our other major projects made dreams reality because our supporters included CHAI in their will, leaving a legacy of compassion that helped thousands of animals, educated children and adults in the importance of caring for animals, and saved countless lives. Including CHAI in your will ensures that your values will be taught in schools and demonstrated in action on behalf of animals throughout Israel.