Who we are — Mokryi Nosyk

It all started with Anya. Long before the organization existed, she was already rescuing animals at her family's recreation spot near Kivertsi — a place where irresponsible people dumped the pets they no longer wanted, year after year. By the time we met, Anya was already caring for seven dogs and fourteen cats. One of them was Lucky — a red-haired dog with a terrible wound on her head. It was through Lucky that Anya and I first met.

Before meeting Anya, I lived in Kyiv and worked at Rozetka — traveling across Ukraine installing cameras at pickup points. Stray animals somehow passed me by. Then I moved closer to Anya's work in Kivertsi and saw it firsthand: boxes of kittens left on the road, dogs coming out of the forest looking for food. I left the capital and moved to Lutsk to be near her — and her cause.

Starting February 24, 2022, people fleeing the shelling began reaching out — they left their animals with us because they didn't know if they could evacuate together. We sheltered animals from Irpin. That's when we fully understood the scale of the problem. In June 2022 the three of us — Anya, me, and Vitalii, who from the very beginning drove animals to sterilization in his own car for a token amount — founded the NGO «Mokryi Nosyk».

Sterilization is at the heart of what we do. It isn't cruelty, as people sometimes assume — it's rescue. We've seen too many animals with infected uteruses full of pus, days away from death by their vet's reckoning. Sterilization stops that, and it stops the endless cycle of newly-abandoned puppies and kittens. Through the organization, more than four thousand animals have now been sterilized.