A very furry welcoming committee.

Pilot Todd Underwood just made an unusual life saving flight for The Egyptian Society for Mercy to Animals (ESMA)  to AJ’s Best Friends.  What’s so unusual about this rescue flight is all 6 cats were rescued from horrible abusive lives in Cairo, Egypt.  Unlike the U.S. and many other countries, there are no animal laws in Egypt and the situation for domestic animals is dire.  People buy them from overcrowded and cruel pet shops, they keep them for a few weeks, and then throw them out in the trash or the street.  They treat them like disposable toys.  The only animal control there is by the government who puts out poison or goes on shooting sprees.

Thanks Todd!

Fortunately, there are some very kind Egyptian volunteers who dedicate their time to rescuing these animals from their horrible situations.  But, since there are so few volunteers, the make-shift shelter there has over 600 animals.  There is no culture of adoption, so the animals just sit there their whole life (which is short because they catch illnesses from one another).  As the Egyptian volunteers work to build a better animal culture in Egypt, they don’t want to let the animals in the shelter have a horrible life.  So they have found shelters abroad that take them and find them forever homes.  We have sent animals to Europe and also to the USA (Milwaukee, SF, San Diego, etc).

The problem is that sending the cats to the USA on cargo is prohibitively expensive.  It is much cheaper if we can find a person flying from Cairo to USA so the animal can fly on their ticket, with them serving as flying parents.  In this case, we had a woman who agreed to take 6 cats to Las Vegas. The shelter is in Phoenix.  Luckily, Pilots N Paws helped us transfer the cats in the last leg of their long journey to safety.

Heidi Morrison
US rep for Egyptian Society for Mercy for Animals
[email protected]

AJ’s Best Friends contact info is [email protected]