Vital Pet Health

What they do....................................

SHWA(UK) works to address the crisis in Siberian Husky Welfare here in the UK on three fronts. The first objective is to rescue and re-home a husky who's living conditions have become unsatisfactory. This can happen for a wide variety of reasons and does not necessarily mean that the animal has been put at risk on purpose. For this reason the second aim of the charity is to offer advice and counselling in order to try and educate owners in a way that means they can adapt to the needs of a husky. Finally, the SHWA(UK) conducts an ongoing education campaign designed to discourage the public from buying a Husky from irresponsible and unethical breeders.

If you want to find out more about this vital charity please visit http://www.shwauk.org.uk

What SHWA(UK) says about their charity...................

The Origins of SHWA(UK)

The Welfare situation in UK Siberian Huskies was fairly stable through the 1990's. The creation of a new online market via the internet resulted in a massive increase in the indiscriminate commercial breeding of Siberians by puppy farmers/backyard breeders and naive/greedy "pet" breeders. The resulting sale of dogs to naive and ill-prepared new owners with little or no support, meant that the welfare situation at the beginning of the 21st Century began to spiral out of control.

By the middle of 2006, a group of individuals based around the Dreamcatcher Online Forum who had been working independently to rescue and rehome unwanted Siberians found that their commitment to welfare had increased to the extent that it was barely manageable as they were being overwhelmed by the demand!  In the year up to Christmas 2006, we found that we had rehomed 70 unwanted Siberian Huskies.

At the same time, the Siberian Husky Club of Great Britain Welfare Scheme (which at the time was the only dedicated breed rescue scheme for Sibes in the UK as a whole) was going through a crisis of its own and in December 2006, the club decided that its Welfare Section could only deal with KC registered dogs bred by or owned by club members. This meant that there was no breed specific safety net out there for the vast majority of unwanted Siberians. In response to this, a group of like-minded individuals organised the founding meeting of SHWA(UK) in February 2007.

Thanks to the hard work and dedication of our volunteers, almost four years on and 450 rehomed  Siberian Huskies and 88 volunteers later, we are still going strong, growing each day and have become - out of necessity, not choice, the biggest and busiest Siberian Husky Welfare organisation in the UK and probably in Europe.