About Animals

About Animals

IMPORTANT NOTICE! We have invested a large amount of care and money over several years in setting up our feeding stations. We have designed and financed the cat hutches and placed them in locations with permission from the property owners. This is how they work: 

Miki, a very special kitten, tells the heartwarming story of how he found his ideal family.

What to do if your pet ingests a poisonous substance, or if you come across dead animals and suspect poisoning as the cause.

A forlorn stray cat had the good luck to fall on all four paws at the Petar Hektorović Elementary School in Stari Grad.

A little dog wandering around the centre of Jelsa, lost, bewildered and frightened, had no way of knowing how her luck was about to turn.

The feast day of St. Francis of Assisi is celebrated on October 4th each year, which is also World Animal Day.

Thanks to Jelsa Mayor Nikša Peronja, Jelsa's stray cats have been given a new chance to survive and thrive in peace.

Eco Hvar is sometimes criticized for doing too little - or even nothing - to help the island's innumerable needy cats and kittens. In fact there are lots of residents around the island, locals and incomers, who consistently do their utmost to help.

Lost or abandoned? It's all too easy for a dog to get lost, often much harder to find it.

We are delighted to see our cat feeders being put to good use! The initiative is developing slowly but surely.

Lucky Luki revels joyfully in his explorations of Hvar's boundless beauties. The Galešnik fortress in the hill to the south above Jelsa is one of his regular haunts.

Luki and his human minder Ivica are keeping the old footpaths viable: Jelsa's historic Tor is one of their favourite destinations.

There's nothing Luki likes better than exploring the lesser known areas of Hvar Island. The eastern region is largely overlooked and (mercifully) underdeveloped, so it is perfect territory for Luki and his friends.

Luki and his two-legged pet parent Ivica love their native land deeply and unreservedly.

August 16th is the feast of St. Rocco, the patron saint of dogs.

Dog owners be warned! In Dalmatia's hot summers, dog paws may need protecting.

Sometime in early November 2018, a bitch was dumped by the roadside above Jelsa, not far from the Medical Services Clinic, with her five puppies.

Donkeys have served humankind since time immemorial. The donkey is a symbol of Dalmatia.

Vrisnik is a village which boasts many animals. Goats are among the most prized.

Dogs in a loving home become friends with their owners. They say that anyone who doesn't like animals doesn't like humans either.

Cats and music both give pleasure to many. Combine the two...pure joy for cat and music lovers!

This is the story of a pony who has captivated the hearts of all around him in the quiet inland village of Svirče on Hvar. He is a walking symbol of unconditional love!

The hunting season on Hvar lasts from October to January, the busy season for hunting dogs.

 

On a lovely sunny March day, a lucky puppy visited Jelsa for a coffee break with her new owners.

Luck intervened when a puppy was left to its fate on wasteland near Split on a hot day in July.

Not all dogs live the life of Riley in Dalmatia, but some are luckier than others. Here Rocky tells his story.

Bobi roamed free in Jelsa for several years. His sudden death carries a warning.

The sufferings of Hvar's cats blight an otherwise happy visit to Hvar.

Nola, a type of Siberian husky, had an unpromising start to her young life.

Dona finds a good home, three years on.

Beautiful, intelligent, good-natured and lively, Negra will bring joy to the right owner.

From Skittish Stari Grad Street Dog to Alpha Canine Queen of Dol, Sveta Ana. Evening Lategano of the Suncrokret Body and Soul Retreat in Dol tells the story of Maza's rescue.

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Eco Environment News feeds

  • Sea ice is melting fast, worsening the climate crisis, but a bold attempt to rethicken it is showing early signs of success

    ‘This would have been a wild dream a year ago,” says Andrea Ceccolini, standing on Arctic sea ice just a 4-mile snowmobile ride from the Inuit town of Cambridge Bay, northern Canada. To his left are sky blue ponds of meltwater created in the last few days by a sun that no longer sets in the high north summer. To his right, the sea ice is still a brilliant white, the light dusting of snow on top continuing to sparkle.

    “It’s incredibly different, the boundary – I mean, you can point to it,” he says. The difference is the result of a bold geoengineering experiment being conducted by Ceccolini’s company, Real Ice, funded by the UK government.

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  • Almost every child, including those from high-income countries, is now exposed to at least one hazard

    Half of the world’s children are exposed to at least three overlapping climate hazards threatening their health, education and survival, according to a Unicef report.

    Globally, children face increasing threats from heatwaves, storms, floods and droughts as the climate crisis worsens, with more than one billion facing at least three of these at once.

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  • Tech is helping to identify and save new specimens and could open ‘genomic goldmine’ of fungi data

    The rise of AI and digitisation could be a turning point in the “race against extinction” faced by botanists trying to identify and save vital plants before they vanish, according to a major report from Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.

    New technology is enabling scientists to track how flowering times have shifted by weeks around the world, rapidly identify new specimens and even get crucial genetic data from 180-year-old fungus specimens, potentially opening a “genomic goldmine”. Digitisation and online access to millions of specimens that were until now only accessible in archives is also producing new insights, especially in the global south.

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  • The short-tailed roundleaf bat was feared extinct until scientist Iroro Tanshi found one in Afi sanctuary in Nigeria, and set out to protect the only confirmed roosting colony

    Just after sunrise, a cacophony of whoops and chatter can be heard over the verdant forests of the Afi mountain wildlife sanctuary. Nestled within the Cross River rainforest in south-east Nigeria, and spanning an area about the size of central Paris, the steep sanctuary is a haven for endangered gorillas, drill monkeys, the grey-necked rockfowl – and the short-tailed roundleaf bat.

    The Nigerian biologist Iroro Tanshi remembers the moment she first spotted the endangered bat in 2016, during a field expedition for her PhD research. “We were trapping near a roost that night, so we caught a lot of bats,” says Tanshi. But, she adds: “This looked very, very different. Big-eared.” She promptly turned to her identification guide, which revealed that the tiny furry creature she was holding between her fingers was Hipposideros curtus, better known as the short-tailed roundleaf bat, last recorded in the wild in the 1970s.

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  • Thinktank says decoupling electricity from gas prices has also helped shield Spain from hikes caused by Iran war

    Spanish households save €10 a month on electricity bills because of wind turbines and solar panels installed in the last five years, a report has found.

    Typical energy bills would be 19% more expensive if electricity costs were still as tightly coupled to gas prices as in 2021, according to Ember, a climate thinktank. It found Spain’s “strategic” expansion of renewables since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022 has shielded Spanish households from the latest rises in fossil fuel prices caused by the Iran war.

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  • Wharfedale, Yorkshire: On the trail of a wood warbler, I find a suite of woodland plants rising up from a fascinating land formation – limestone pavement

    Grass Wood is a magnificent fragment of ancient woodland owned and exceptionally well managed by the Yorkshire Wildlife Trust. It is home to some lovely plants, including lily of the valley and herb paris. What became my defining revelation about the place and, in truth, about this whole area was down to a wood warbler.

    It is among my favourite birds, so getting to see the individual singing just off the trail required me to enter the trees, rise up a short bank, and then sit for a long time on a rocky ledge. Slowly it dawned on me that the platform on which I rested, while carpeted in moss, was also incised into a tessellated pattern. From these narrow cracks in the limestone arose a suite of woodland plants. It was dense with ash seedlings, ferns and sedges, as well as linear thickets of dog’s mercury, but there – unmistakably where my hand rested – were strips of flowering herb paris.

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  • Amid fears the wreck will be more accessible to explorers – and new species – as the climate warms, conservationists want to create the region’s first underwater protected area

    The harsh temperatures, treacherous currents and shifting pack ice of the Antarctic’s Weddell Sea, which crushed and sank his ship, Endurance, in 1915, led Ernest Shackleton to describe it as the “worst portion of the worst sea in the world”.

    For more than a century, the inhospitable conditions, which present a challenge even for modern icebreaker ships, helped to protect the lost wreck, which was discovered in 2022, its structure still largely intact.

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  • Residents of West Oakland, which suffers from toxic waste and high pollution rates, rally against a coal export facility

    West Oakland, a California neighborhood known for its rich history of Black activism from the Pullman Porters’ union to the Black Panthers, might not seem like the site of the country’s next great coal project.

    But that’s exactly what the Trump administration is pushing for – with the injection of $75m to build a sprawling coal export terminal in the nearby port of Oakland.

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  • ‘Saddened, stunned, surprised and haunted’ is how one surfer describes the mood at the popular Sydney beach two days after Leah Stewart was bitten by a great white

    Under a clear blue sky on a Monday morning, Coogee beach in Sydney’s east is quiet.

    A few swimmers have ventured into the ocean pools at the northern and southern ends of the beach. Most others sit on the sand, looking towards the water.

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  • Activists argue business model is ‘plantation tourism’ designed to benefit elite and disadvantage most Jamaicans

    Devon Taylor remembers when the Mammee Bay shoreline in St Ann, Jamaica, was filled with children frolicking in the ocean after school, fishers haggling with locals over the price of their daily catch and craft vendors carving souvenirs under almond trees.

    “I grew up on Mammee Bay,” Taylor says. He recalls fetching seawater in bottles for his grandmother when she was no longer able to go to the beach, learning to swim in the shallows, and watching generations of fishers cast their nets. “That beach raised us. It fed us.”

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