Animal welfare group Save Our Street Dogs (SOSD) on Saturday pulled the plug on its SOS hotline, about three months after setting it up.



Members of the public misused the hotline, the group said Wednesday when Yahoo Singapore asked about the reason for the move.



SOSD was set up in July 2011 in response to the growing number of strays being culled due to urbanisation.



For about two years, the group functioned without an official hotline, using e-mails to stay in touch with the public, but as the organisation gained more attention, members decided to set up a proper hotline.



While the hotline was meant to help the public alert SOSD to urgent cases such as injured strays, the group had been inundated with calls and SMSes from people seeking help for the caretaking of their family pets.



Some people, for example, would ask SOSD to help subsidise their vet bills, or to take in their pet dogs, an SOSD spokesman told Yahoo Singapore.



“Some say they are pregnant and cannot take care of their dogs, or they just no longer want their dogs and would like to give them up to us,” he said.



“There are people who add that they have called other authorities who then referred them to us,” he said.



The hotline hours were supposed to be 10am to 10pm, but the phone kept ringing well past those hours, the spokesman added.



SOSD operates with the help of volunteers who also hold full-time jobs and juggle other commitments. Sometimes, when a volunteer manning the phone misses a call, they get scolded or “flamed” online, he said.



While the group has closed the hotline for now, they hope to reopen it in time to come, though there are no concrete plans yet.



In a Facebook post apologizing for closing the hotline, the group said that in order to prevent burnout, “the best way forward… is to remove the SOS phone, until we are rich enough to employ someone to man it in future”.



In the meantime, email is the best way to contact SOSD.



The group’s current shelter lease will be up in 2014, and they are in the midst of raising funds to build a new shelter which will ideally be able to house up to 150 dogs at a time- double that of their current capacity.



This project will cost an estimated five million dollars, part of which the group hopes to raise at their upcoming flag day event to be held on 10 November at *Scape.



“It won’t just be like any other flag day, it’ll be like a carnival or a show-and-tell,” the spokesman said, adding that the group is planning for more than a dozen dogs to be along the Orchard Road stretch on that day to educate the public on the misconception that all mongrels are aggressive.



SOSD is still looking for volunteers for the event. Application closes 22 October. Interested applicants can email them.

































































