Giving warmth, food and kindness. With this desire, Ivanka Dimova has embarked on an unequal battle with bureaucracy, prejudice and indifference to provide a home for every street dog in a small Bulgarian town. After a decade of struggle, today Veliki Preslav finally has its own dog shelter.

"We make sure we are warm in the winter," says Ivanka Dimova. Together with the volunteers, she has already laid straw in the cages, but her biggest concern is to find blankets to wrap the newborn puppies. The former zoo corner is starting to look more and more like a real shelter, and she does not hide her satisfaction with this fact.

"We are now in the process of construction, we are slowly improving the conditions”, adds Ivanka Dimova. “The cages have new and stable nets, we have small houses for each puppy. Our veterinary clinic is almost ready. We are making progress, albeit at a slow pace”.

To improve the conditions in the shelter and to provide food for the dogs, Bärbel Ostmann from the German association Streunernothilfe Grenzenlos lent her a helping hand. The municipality is also involved with BGN 15,000 per year, which goes for medical examinations, castrations, chipping. There are still no employed staff in the shelter, so Ivanka Dimova relies on enthusiastic volunteers to take care of the animals. However, whatever efforts are made until the state forces dog owners to take responsibility, the swarm of homeless animals will not stop.

"There are a lot of baby puppies - they let them out of the houses, some are with their mothers, others are alone," says Ivanka Dimova. “We constantly respond to signals, we collect dogs, we neuter them. Last year alone we neutered 120 animals. There was almost no uncastrated dog in the town, and suddenly this spring 5-6 mothers appeared and continue to throw them away - pregnant, newborn puppies in sacks and boxes. It's scary, we're spinning in a circle. If there is no strong law for domestic animals, so be it - we will collect, castrate, and they will breed them peacefully."

Last year alone, nearly 90 dogs from the shelter in Veliki Preslav have been adopted abroad, and over 80 have found a family in Bulgaria. In order for a person to adopt an animal, Ivanka Dimova insists in his or her contract that he or she will required to send information about how the dogs feel in their new home. One of the happy moments for the benefactress is when her adoptive parents call to thank her that their newly adopted dog is not scared of them.

"Those people who have adopted animals from other shelters say that my animals are very social," she says proudly. “I manage to accustom them to the human presence with activities, with play. In the morning I first go to each cage to see if they are healthy, if we need to go to the doctors. With our volunteers, we caress them, we play with them. I don't have a dog that isn't social."

Does she consider herself a hero, seeing every day that the animals she has saved from a painful fate are happy?

"It doesn't matter if I'm a hero," says Ivanka Dimova. “The important thing is that I go to bed with a clear conscience at night. Over the years, I have gone through hell because I experience the suffering of every animal in distress.”

Compiled by Diana Tsankova (based on an interview of Rosalina Cherneva, BNR-Shumen)

English version Rositsa Petkova