Aid 4 Animals in Distress

About Aid4Aid

In 2015 a handful of neighbours in Kirstenhof started a WhatsApp group about the stray animals in their streets. It is now a registered NPO with more than 2 000 rescues behind it.

Who we are

A no-kill rescue in Cape Town's greater South

Aid 4 Animals in Distress — Aid4Aid — rescues, rehabilitates and rehomes animals in distress: injured, abandoned, abused and stray animals in Kirstenhof and the surrounding southern suburbs.

We were born in 2015, when a group of animal-loving people started a WhatsApp group to coordinate the rescues we were already doing in our own neighbourhood. The network grew quickly, and in April 2016 Aid 4 Animals in Distress was formally constituted as a registered NPO.

We are still working professionals doing this over and above our day jobs, entirely voluntarily. There is no paid management, no premises and no government funding — we rely on the generosity of supporters and of companies who back the work.

There is also no shelter, and that isn't an oversight. Every animal lives in a foster home from the moment they are rescued until the day they are adopted, which is why we know our animals well enough to place them properly.

An Aid4Aid volunteer holding a tan-and-white puppy wrapped in a pale blue towel, in a school hall.
Mass sterilisation day, May 2026.

Rescue, rehabilitate, rehome

We take in injured, abandoned, abused and stray animals from Kirstenhof and the surrounding southern suburbs — and have done, over 2 000 times.

There is no shelter. There never has been. Every animal lives in a foster home from the moment they're rescued until the day they're adopted, and we cover all food and all medical costs so that fostering costs the household nothing.

That model is why the matching works — an animal who has lived in someone's house for three months is an animal whose temperament is actually known. It is also the hard limit on how many we can save at once: with no spare foster homes, the next rescue can't happen.

Adoption costs R1 200. By that point the animal has cost us around R3 000 in vet care, sterilisation, vaccination and food.

Meet the animalsFoster one
A days-old ginger kitten being bottle-fed by hand on a green towel.
Seven rescued kittens huddled together on a fleece blanket in a foster basket.
A litter of rescued puppies fast asleep in a heap on a red blanket in a foster bed.

Mass sterilisation

Rescuing animals one at a time never gets ahead of the problem. Since February 2025 we have been running mass sterilisation days in Lavender Hill and Cafda — communities with severe animal overpopulation and, until then, no sterilisation programme at all.

Our field workers sign animals up door to door. The SPCA mobile unit or our own team collects them, they are treated either at the SPCA hospital or in a theatre set up on site, and they go home the same day or the next with a bag of food.

That is 1 057 animals so far. In Lavender Hill the breeding measurably slowed once we passed roughly 700, which is the whole point — beyond a certain level of coverage the population becomes manageable instead of endless.

What every animal gets

  • Defleaed
  • Dewormed
  • Vaccinated
  • Sterilised
  • Microchipped
  • Sent home with food
A brown dog on the table at a mass sterilisation day, a vet in scrubs and mask working behind it.
A vet in scrubs attending to a sedated black-and-white cat wearing a paper name collar.
Five tan-and-white puppies waiting together in a crate at a sterilisation day.

Outreach & educate

Not every animal in trouble needs rescuing. Some just need their owner to have what they need to look after them.

We send food, blankets and supplies to underprivileged homes in the greater south that are struggling to care for their own animals, and we pay for sterilisations at the local SPCA for owners who can't afford the procedure. Keeping an animal fed and warm in the home it already has is cheaper, kinder and less disruptive than taking it into care.

Education is one of our founding objectives, and in practice most of it happens on doorsteps rather than in classrooms. The field-worker team's daily conversations about sterilisation — why it matters, what it prevents, that the law requires it — are why 1 057 animals have been signed up rather than rounded up.

See the wishlist
An Aid4Aid field worker and a colleague in a Paws-a-While shirt talking with a resident holding a puppy, on a street between blocks of flats.
Two men with a small white dog wearing a pink collar on the table inside the mobile clinic, one in an Aid4Aid shirt with a slip lead over his shoulders.
An Aid4Aid volunteer sitting on the tailgate of the mobile clinic truck, surrounded by a crowd of smiling children from the neighbourhood.

Meet the team

Nobody here is paid

Working professionals doing this over and above their day jobs.

The field-worker team

Out on the streets of Lavender Hill and Cafda every day, the field workers are the heart of the work there. They sign animals up for sterilisation door to door, teach owners how to care for their animals doorstep by doorstep, and help rescue animals in distress.

  • JJ Jones — lead
  • Roxanne Alard
  • Gadija Abrahams
  • Shenees Daniels
  • Nicole Southgate
Aid4Aid field workers in branded shirts at a sterilisation day, in front of the Aid4Aid and SPCA banners.