The girls traded gadgets and dates for cats and dogs.
Every month, the Timonin family — dad, mom, twin sisters Sasha and Tanya - load dozens of kilograms of animal feed into the car and go to Ryazan, where the Zveropolis shelter is located. It is 60 kilometers to get to it from the small town of Mikhailov, where the family lives. The path is not close, but it is the nearest place where you can help homeless animals, writes Dobro.Journal.
About 60 dogs and 20 cats live in the Ryazan "Zveropolis". The food that the family brings is collected by teenagers — 14-year-old twin sisters Sasha and Tanya. At school they tell teachers, students and their parents about the shelter. And for good reason, many respond and give the girls food packages.
Why are teenagers looking for food for stray animals instead of playing with friends? Why are parents being persuaded to take another kitty home from the shelter, rather than buy a new gadget? That's what the twins' mother Maria told the journalists :
"Animals are the pain of our family. For as long as I can remember, we've always had dog cats, often maimed."
And sisters Sasha and Tanya have known about volunteering since childhood, their mother is a curator of the youth movement. Now the Timonins have two dogs, a cat and two cats who were taken from the shelter. Some of the stories in this family are related to human cruelty towards animals.
For example, Felix, the missing cat, was found two years later with a severed nose.
"When I see an injured animal, I feel disgusted with the people who did it," Sasha says. "I think it's unfair that dogs and cats have such a hard life on the street."
Other student volunteers joined the girls in their hometown. During the year, they collected 540 kilograms of feed, 15 beds and 40 packs of filler for trays. The parents of the students learned that Timonins help animals. Now, when they meet a stray cat or dog on the street, they immediately call their mother.
But the Timonin family does not stop there, because collecting food is not enough — the shelter needs new aviaries. To find funds the Timonins wrote a project and applied for the International Volunteer Award, which is how Sasha Timonina's House of Hope appeared. And the noble grant will very soon have 8 new aviaries in the Ryazan "Zveropolis".
Now Sasha and Tanya dream that there will also be a shelter in their hometown and there will be fewer mutilated and abandoned animals on the streets.