Dawn Images

Away from the everyday hustle and bustle of big city life, in the quiet town of Charsadda, an elderly woman sits in the midst of hundreds of dogs. She pets all the broken animals that walk up to her, never running out of hugs and kisses to shower upon them.

The dogs, mostly in plasters and bandages, look up to her with sparkling eyes, all of them vying for the perfect spot — her lap.

“They are all my babies,” Zeba Masood said with a warm smile spread wide across her face.

An animal lover, she has been running Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s first animal shelter, Lucky Animal Protection Shelter or LAPS, for the past six years without a single day off. The organisation not only provides shelter to stray animals but also finds them loving homes, a far cry from the lives of torture, hatred and pain they’ve had to endure.

“The animals here were beaten to exhaustion; some of them had broken limbs, some were ruthlessly poisoned and left on the roads to die, some were starved to the extent where I found them nibbling on plastic and paper,” Masood recalled.

“This is the story not of a single neighbourhood, but of every corner, every street.

“The sight of these voiceless creatures, battered and abused, pains me in ways that are impossible to put into words,” she told Images, her voice laced with frustration and hurt.

Sowing the seeds

Living in Peshawar, for Masood, the sight of animals in pain was not a new one. Ultimately, that commonplace sight is what led to the creation of LAPS.

She recalls that like most Pakistanis, her parents weren’t very interested in keeping pets at home. But they were kind enough to get her a dog, whom she named Vicky. He stuck with her right till the end, leaving behind his offspring to keep her company.

Masood’s love for animals followed her to the United States, where she lived for nearly 40 years. “Even there, we would always bring strays home and take care of them. Not just me, but my children also feel the same way,” she told Images.

The journey to the creation of LAPS began when she returned to Peshawar in 2017. “I came back due to my mother’s illness, but what deeply disturbed me was the cruelty [on display].”

And so Masood began feeding dogs, cats, donkeys, horses and other strays. She found the perfect companion for these excursions in her husband. The couple would initially carry animal food in the trunk of their car and feed a pack of dogs in an empty plot owned by Masood’s father.

And then one day, she asked her father if she could fence in a small enclosure in the plot for her rescues. After hours of cajoling, LAPS was born.

“The first animal I rescued was a pit bull, Lucky, and named our shelter after him,” she said.

LAPS currently houses nearly 300 dogs. Masood and her small team have so far vaccinated over 5,000 stray animals and neutered more than 3,000 dogs and cats. They have an in-house vet for regular check-ups and call in specialised doctors for monthly visits.

While the operations of the shelter are mostly self-funded, over the years, Masood has built a strong network of donors.

Hurdles aplenty

However, running a shelter hasn’t been an easy job for Masood and her husband.

“For some reason, people never got a hold as to why we were rescuing animals. Even my friends and family would often ask why I chose to open an animal shelter and not a non-profit organisation for ‘humans’.

“They never understood that there are hundreds of NGOs to cater to women, orphans and others. But when it comes to animals, people hardly have anything to give, not sympathy not empathy…these animals can’t even speak for themselves or express the pain they feel,” she argued.

There were days when Masood would wake up to the walls of her shelter chalked with obscenities. On other days, men would throw stones and bricks at the rescued animals, harming without a single reason. Some even tried to shoot her strays.

“Ye na-paak hain [they are impure]” and “Yahan farishtay nahi ayengain [angels won’t come here]” are two of the refrains she heard every day.

“One day,” she told Images, “a local jirga came to my house and grabbed my husband by the collar.” Fortunately, the police intervened in time but a few days later, the jirga rammed her door again and this time she was alone. The police were called again and while they forced the group to disperse, they could not root out the problem.

“Instead, they told me to relocate and move to the quiet town of Charsadda,” Masood recalled. And so LAPS, with all its dogs and donkeys, travelled about 20.9 kilometres south of Peshawar, away from the hatred and curses.

The price of kindness

While her animals bring her immense happiness, witnessing the hatred directed at the furry-legged creatures over the past six years has taken a toll on Masood.

There are days when she is plagued with self-doubt. “Am I doing enough?” she often asks herself.

“As we speak, my team is trying to save a dog […] somebody is trying to shoot them and we are trying our best to rescue the animal,” Masood said. This is not the first time such an incident has occurred — she has seen far worse.

“Because of the prevailing gun culture in the province, most of the cases we see are of animal shootings,” she highlighted.

Over the last six years, Masood has seen teenagers throwing days-old kittens into gutters, people poisoning mother dogs and their newborn litters, and men beating donkeys to death.

“Sometimes, we would rescue animals only to watch them die at LAPS because their condition is so, so bad and no matter how hard we try we just can’t save them,” she lamented.

The 2022 floods, Masood recalled, were one of the most traumatic periods in her life. LAPS lost 15 dogs during the deluge, as up to seven feet of floodwater entered the shelter. “The smaller dogs we took home, but we had no other option but to leave the bigger ones on the roof of the shelter.”

When the situation grew too dangerous, she had to relocate the animals. But that was another challenge. “You cannot imagine the kind of harassment we faced, even from supposedly educated people…it was just pure heartache,” she said.

A long journey ahead

While these experiences have left Masood deeply unsettled, they also showed her how important it is to keep moving forward and do more.

LAPS, she said, spays and vaccinates at least five stray dogs and cats a week. “That is nothing, I would want to vaccinate at least 10 dogs a day, but unfortunately I don’t have the funds to do so.”

Therefore, Masood is now trying to reach out to international donors, both for funds and help with adoption. She believes that vaccinating stray dogs and cats is extremely important, not just for the animals themselves but also to keep humans safe.

She wants to create awareness, particularly among the younger generations. “We need to educate our kids to treat animals with compassion and be empathetic. Only when we do this will we be able to create a better society,” said Masood.

She also wants to bring acceptance into society. This world, she said, is as much theirs as it is ours. The only way forward is coexistence.

To illustrate her point, Masood quotes Mahatma Gandhi: “The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.”

This March, Images is profiling trailblazing women who are, in their own ways big or small, stirring change in our society. Women who inspire us and women who make us proud. You can read all our stories on inspiring Pakistani women here.