Below we publish an appeal from the Klekusiowo director to all people of goodwill who are not indifferent to the fate of animals. The Klekusiowo centre is facing closure:
My name is Mieczysław Żuraw. I am a representative and volunteer at the Klekusiowo Wild Animal Rehabilitation Centre in Tomaszów Bolesławiecki. Our centre is the only one in the region and one of the few in Poland dedicated to rescuing and treating wild animals. Without the support of your local government, we are facing the extremely difficult decision to stop accepting animals due to the centre’s dramatic financial situation. The purpose of this petition is to secure regular financial support for the Wild Animal Rehabilitation Centre in exchange for providing care to injured wild animals.
We ask you to contribute 2 PLN per resident, and under this cooperation the municipality will be assured of care for wild animals that receive help from us. The aims of our centre are to rescue and treat wild animals and, whenever possible, return them to the wild. However, an animal cannot always return to freedom and, due to permanent disability, must remain at Klekusiowo for the rest of its life under our care. Animals come to us from the entire Lower Silesian Voivodeship! Human awareness and sensitivity are growing, enabling us to save animals that are entrusted to Klekusiowo’s care.
We operate in accordance with all the provisions of the Animal Protection Act and keep an animal register containing detailed medical descriptions, admission dates and places where the animals were found. Every day, more animals arrive that need our support. The centre currently houses, among others, white and black storks, white-tailed eagles, a gull, a crane and owls—animals under strict protection, but not only them. We also help hedgehogs, roe deer, squirrels and all the other animals.
During the current peak season, the number of animals in our care exceeds 300! Every pet owner understands the costs involved in maintaining even one animal. We must cover not only the cost of feeding such a large number of animals—which require high-quality food, specialised milk, fresh meat, fish, vegetables, fruit, larvae and nuts—but also, among other things, procedures and operations, medicines, probiotics, dressings, energy, cleaning products, waste collection and transporting injured animals.
We operate transparently—on our website, klekusiowo.pl you can find financial statements demonstrating how high our costs are—in 2022 they averaged PLN 38,000 per month! You will also find live broadcasts from the lives of the storks at our centre, and on Klekusiowo’s Facebook profile—videos and photos from our daily work. Please help! We are open to dialogue—we want to work with you on the basis of cooperation. In exchange for a donation, we will accept injured wild animals from your municipality. The costs of maintaining, treating and feeding them have risen considerably. Without support from state institutions, we will have to refuse help to every person who comes to us with an injured animal—people of goodwill who live in our voivodeship.
Support from municipalities would help us continue accepting more animals without interruption, provide them with professional veterinary care and look after sick animals. We helped the first storks as early as 2010, and we have been providing assistance at the Wild Animal Rehabilitation Centre for six years—every day, from morning until night, including holidays and days off. Our employees and volunteers care for our animals with appropriate experience, as well as passion and empathy. The counties and municipalities belonging to the Kwisa Municipal Association support the shelter in Przylasek, which receives dogs. It is no secret that approximately 8 PLN is contributed per resident, resulting in a huge total annual amount exceeding PLN 1,200,000 (in words: one million two hundred thousand zlotys).
I appeal to you to also consider the fate of other animals—wild ones, which almost nobody remembers. For us, enormous support would be provided by contributing just 2 PLN per resident! All other animals can come to us, to our centre! As those running the centre, we receive no financial benefits for operating the Wild Animal Rehabilitation Centre. We declare that we consent to the personal data of the entity submitting the petition being disclosed on the website.