As my husband (Alois) and I (Brigitte) made our dream come true in 1994 and moved to Canada, we had no idea what journey we had in front of us. We have always been animal and nature loving and therefore we choose a home which was far away from big cities. We live in a forest near a wonderful lake where we give wild animals a second chance and a loving home. Here we feel we can make ourselves useful and have found our calling in life.


Alois and Brigitte Böhmer

We really wanted to help wild animals, but this proved itself harder then we imagined. For the people here it was unimaginable that there where humans that want to help raccoons and groundhogs, then raccoons and groundhogs are not welcomed visitors on peoples properties. We just could not stop thinking about them. Where were all the animal babies, who lost their mothers to traffic? So we began searching for animal shelters, to ask them what happens to those animals. At the beginning we came across a lot of scepticism, since we are foreigners here.



First of all we adopted dogs, in order to save them from euthanasia. We found our first raccoon babies by a family, who lived near us. As time went on I met a lot of people, with the same opinions as we had, and so we got more contacts. If somebody finds orphaned animal babies, they get brought to us. By now we are working together with a lot of animal shelters.



Unfortunately every year orphaned animals need our help. Since 2005 we work together with a family, who help us feed some of these babies. Once the little ones can eat for themselves they come back to us. Here they have the opportunity to live wild and yet still get help from us for a year, until they become completely wild, all by themselves. However there are far too few that help us bottle feed the babies, care for them ...and so on. Very often it is a financial problem. Hardly anyone will work on a voluntary basis, even though it is for a good cause. The people here have to work to survive and don't get a lot of help from the state.

From April onwards we hardly have any free time, and all the suffering we see each and every day is sometimes hard to digest. Even though it is a lot of work, we love our foundlings. We finance everything ourselves and sometimes a nice animal shelter helps us with dog food.



In addition to fighting for the lives of these animals, we get many calls from people, who have problems with wild animals. The animal shelters that should deal with these calls, don't really have the time to give instructions and help them, and so they give out our number. Quite often do I have to have long phone calls to convince people that having a raccoon in the house is not just annoying. In many cases they need help on their home premises and so I have to drive out to the people involved. This always costs me a lot of time and nerves! It does happen that i have to take very small offspring with me. A trip like that usually lasts at least 4 hours and my orphans need their bottles.

So to do all this we need every helping hand. Please contact us if you want to get involved. We only want animal lovers. We cannot pay a lot, but we can offer lodging and food. Fir true Animal and Nature-lovers it is a true paradise.