Friday’s International Animal Day had special significance for Loulé’s trailblazing animal shelter ARA. After five long - and often exasperatingly frustrating - years, the local council has withdrawn the demolition order it imposed in 2019.

Founder Sid Richardson recognises - in retrospect - that perhaps he was a ‘little too critical’ of the situation of animal welfare in his borough when he built ARA from scratch, clearing scrubland and bushes and creating an undeniable oasis for animal welfare. He didn’t wait for a licence “because there was no time to lose”: kennels everywhere were full to bursting; the council had taken over 18 months looking for a ‘suitable plot’ on which they would allow him to build. A man on a mission, enough was enough. Sid is not someone to sit on his hands and wait for things to happen. So, yes, he realises he didn’t do things ‘the way authorities would have liked’ - but then he isn’t in the business of animal welfare to please authorities...

Thus ARA - quite clearly the blueprint for how animal shelters in a caring world should be - started life brazenly; unashamedly - and was summarily slapped with a demolition order for its unorthodox approach to municipal niceties.

Like we said, Sid isn’t in this game to please authorities, so he fought the demolition order - and fought it… and fought it. And along the way, he received boundless public support, won media acclaim, delivered some inspired PR… and, much more importantly, started saving hundreds of animals.

The council found itself looking for a way out of the impasse. It gave the go-ahead for the ‘Cat Village’ project, which has succeeded in sterilising over 1,530 cats in its first year, and now it has been magnanimously successful in removing the demolition order: Sid’s ‘dream’ - a project he never imagined he would do in his own lifetime - has taken precedence over demolition on the basis that ARA stands as “a special requirement for the community”.

Everyone is delighted, and the animals - who were never even aware there was a problem - are also delighted.


Now 80, Sid seemingly has no intention of slowing down: “there is still so much to do”, he tells us.

ARA may be one of the best animal shelters in Europe, with ecological insulated kennels for 100 dogs, four catteries for 50 cats, 14 park areas, including water pools, sand pits, and toys, a host of staff, even more volunteers and 21 ‘resident work-aways’ - but there are dozens of other shelters that aren’t: municipal kennels, particularly, that offer little comfort, zero in the way of ‘education’ to resident animals (which helps them be successfully homed) - and dismally inadequate when it comes to getting to grips with the need for mass-sterilisations.

Well over 40 years since an eccentric Englishwoman alighted in the Algarve from the Far East with her ‘lamb chop’ (a crippled dog rescued from life in a bird cage), and started creating merry hell - literally shaming councils into adopting sterilisation campaigns, the problem persists: ARA is regularly called upon to bottle feed newly-born litters discovered ‘thrown into rubbish bins’.

Protocols with 14 local schools are designed to ‘raise awareness among the younger generations’, in the hope that they will ‘teach’ their parents and grandparents how things should be done - and it is definitely working… but not quickly enough.

Another blot on the landscape are the people who still think it is acceptable to keep dogs on chains: ARA means to “continue its fight against chained dogs”, says the shelter’s ‘ambassador’ João Ferreira - a young animal lover who has appeared on countless television shows, with his magical entourage of once discarded dogs.

Thus, Sid has great people around him; ARA has great people around it - but there will always be room for more; there will always be room for volunteers, both in the kennels and catteries and in any of ARA’s three charity shops.

Loulé town council is quite correct: ARA IS a special requirement for the community. The trouble is that the Algarve is bigger than Loulé. It needs more ARAs.

Text by Natasha Bund