Laura Koskinas decided she had to find a way to help
Cat lovers at the Agni Animal Welfare Fund(Image: Agni Animal Welfare Fund )
An animal-loving mum with a passion for online shopping has combined her two obsessions for one special cause. Laura Koskinas, 41, was moved by the plight of stray cats on the streets of her husband’s native Corfu, and resolved to do something about it.
Laura, from Wigan, fell in love on the Greek island in the 1990s. But after returning to the UK in the early 2000s, Laura’s annual visits to the island left her increasingly dismayed at the stray cat problem there.
She said: “I’ve probably been visiting the island for about thirty years. I’ve got a real connection with the place, it’s where I met my husband, we were both working in the tourism industry and stayed over there for several years – it was a real holiday romance.
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“It [the cat problem] has gotten worse in recent years, mostly because they can’t find homes for the stray cats. When you get to Corfu you can’t help but feel sorry for them, you see tourists buying food and medicine in the supermarkets, but once the summer season is finished there’s nobody left to look after them.”
Living in the UK Laura found herself with a limited ability to help the felines, as post-Brexit rules on animal quarantine made the adoption process much harder. The price of new health certificates (AHC) and designated transport routes quickly added up – making the costs unbearable.
Laura said: “I’d love to adopt a cat from Greece, but Brexit does hinder it. It’s a shame really, I’m sure more people would be willing to adopt if it were easier.”
The Agni Animal Welfare Fund is a UK-registered charity operating in Corfu
Instead, she resolved to do what she could from her Wigan home, using the easyfundraising website to drive up donations for the Agni Animal Welfare Fund, a UK-registered charity operating in Corfu. In return for using the easyfundraising website for her online shopping, the retailers she buys from donate a percentage of her purchase without adding extra onto her bill.
Recently winning easyfundraising’s Daily Gift Hunt, Laura earned an additional £500 for the charity. She said: “I always make sure I use the easyfundraising platform around Christmas and birthdays, usually a lot of the donations I raise are through shops with eBay and Argos. But it really is just the little purchases that add up and can go a long way.”
Laura Koskinas, 41, from Wigan(Image: Agni Animal Welfare Fund )
Greece remains home to an estimated 3m stray cats, who all too often have short, distressing lives, according to Animal Action Greece. Despite efforts to curb their growing population since the Mediterranean nation joined the EU in the 1980s, the issue of care and feeding has consistently fallen to voluntary groups.
Angela Travers-Ayre, founder of Agni Animal Welfare, added: “Every day we support the cats of Corfu with everything they need from medical treatments to basic food provisions. easyfundraising has provided us with extra income to enable this work at no extra costs to our supporters.
“Normally our volunteers spend their time outside providing food for the cats, setting up small feeding boxes and shelters. Extra donations help us do that little bit more and let us do the best we possibly can, to support these animals.”