I met Laura Raikes about 19 years after she moved from Wales to Playa del Carmen. She is the Founder and President of Coco’s Animal Welfare, which I visited on November 9th, 2021, to talk to her about their beginnings, challenges, and, most importantly, how they are making a real change.
Laura built Coco’s Animal Welfare clinic from scratch, driven by her immense compassion, determination, and ability to unite people who want to see lasting change. While their main focus is providing low-cost sterilization, their activities extend far beyond that. This is a deep dive into her life’s work. Please spread the word, and if you can, help support them.
Today is a sterilization day, isn’t it?
LR: We are a permanent sterilization clinic for cats and dogs; we sterilize animals everyday apart from Wednesdays and Sundays. Tuesday is cat day and we sterilize around 50 cats. On the other days it’s a mixture of 20 dogs and cats. We sterilize street animals (we run a TNR Trap Neuter Return program for feral cats), rescued animals, animals from other rescue organizations along with peoples pets who’s can’t afford to take them to a private vet clinic.
You come from Wales, what brought you to Playa and when?
LR: 19 years ago, when I was 17, I came on holiday with my family to stay in a hotel. I just fell in love with Mexico and the sun, because the weather in Wales is terrible. I also loved the culture, the dancing and the music. I got a job and I ended up staying, It was supposed to be just for 6 months but I’m still here.
Could you tell us the story of Coco’s Animal Welfare from the beginning?
LR: At the time, I didn’t know that many people here and I was given this little rescued kitten called Coco who was with me all day, everyday…She was the cutest little kitten, little Coco.
When she was only 8 months old, she was run over and died. The security guy knocked on my door and while laughing told me my cat was dead. I went and picked her up from the side of the road and it just completely broke my heart.
In the UK it is very common for cats to go inside and outside. I was brought up in a small town and it was normal for cats to be free, I didn’t realize that things were different here in Mexico and that it is better to keep the cats inside. Many people here treated cats like vermin and they can be poisoned, run over, get abused in many terrible ways. People don’t drive as carefully if there is a cat on the road, sometimes people actually swerve to try to hit the cat instead of to avoid it.
It was a mistake to let Coco outside and I learned a big lesson there. The security guard found it funny and whoever hit her just drove off without a care in the world. After losing my sweet Coco I wanted to change how people felt and wanted to make a difference. I wanted to help all the other cats that I came across. A week later, literally 7 days after Coco passed away I went to the supermarket, I was really sad as I passed the cat food section thinking, “I don’t need to buy cat food anymore!” – I was really upset. On the way home in a car I heard a squeaking sound and I just knew it was a kitten in need of help! It was late at night, pitch black but I yelled “stop the car!” and climbed into the jungle in the middle of the night to rescue this little squeaking kitten. We named him Rambo and we kept him. From there on a few weeks later another kitten, Luna, came along.
I started getting in touch with some local people who were helping animals and I learned about a program called TNR (trap, neuter, return). There were lots of feral cats outside my house, I started trapping them, having them neutered, returning them, feeding them and it all began there. I spoke with local vets and got 7 of them in total to donate 2 free surgeries a week. Everyday was a different clinic, and many friends of mine started helping, dropping off the cats for their surgery and picking them up again later in the day. Once they had recovered, we would put them back creating stable cat colonies that no longer reproduce. We also started taking in the kittens, getting them healthy and finding forever homes for them. It all started very small and grew quickly which was when I decided that something bigger needed to be done. This was when I created the non-profit – Coco’s Cat Rescue dedicated to TNR, education and rescuing and finding homes for small kittens. It was important to me that Coco’s did not become a shelter because it’s not the solution and I felt strongly that a bigger difference could be made in focusing on solving the problem with sterilization and education. That’s how Coco’s Cat Rescue began and very quickly we managed to get funding to get a small house which we turned into a permanent spay and neuter clinic. We hired our own full-time vet, who would sterilize animals every day and from there on it grew and continued growing. We didn’t want to leave the dogs out and saw such a need for help there too so we started helping dogs as well and very soon we became Coco’s Animal Welfare. We now have 4 vets working full-time and a new incredible clinic which we’ve grown into and we are now able to help even more animals.
Where do you think all the compassion comes from?
LR: I always loved animals. My parents helped me rescue whatever I found as a kid: a dog, a bird, a cat, a bat, a seagull, whatever I found… I ended up with two goats, I had a sheep and a cow. When I was little, my father worked on a farm and there was a calf that was really sick and he brought it home and put it in the living room for the night for us to look after. I think my dad bringing animals home from the farm had an influence on my love for helping animals. I always loved animals, I was very lucky my mom and dad let me adopt and help different animals as I was growing up.
Where do you get the donations for ongoing activities?
LR: Auctions, major donors, grants, non-profits, international organizations and events. It has been challenging during covid as we haven’t been able to have live fundraising events.
How often do you organize fundraising events?
LR: We do 2 online auctions per year, one in the spring and one in the fall. We also have our big anniversary cocktail party in March each year which has a live auction as well. In total 3 fundraising events a year, one live an two online.
How are you and Coco’s doing nowadays?
LR: Since we began we have achieved: 44,977 spay and neuter surgeries on dogs and cats, 1.284 kittens rescued, 402 dogs rescued, 10,955 cats and kittens helped by our rescue support program and 6,245 dogs helped by our rescue support program.
It has been a challenging time with covid but all things considered we are doing really well.
We have different programs at Coco’s to help animals. Our main program is the permanent sterilization clinic which runs 5 days a week, we sterilize 20 animals every day and 50 cats on Tuesdays, that is our main mission as through sterilization we are preventing so many from being born to suffer on the streets. We also have our cat and dog support programs. Initially, these programs were for rescued animals for people to access low cost medical care, including consults, vaccines, deparasite medications, kitten milk and bottles for new born kittens and support. Since the pandemic, we opened the program up for pets as so many people have been affected economically and can’t afford to go to a regular vet clinic. We trust people to not take advantage of the services offered at Coco’s because we don’t want to affect the economy of the local vet clinics. We ask people if they can afford it to please go to a local vet clinic and support the local businesses, if you can’t then come to us. We try to help the people who need help. The support program is run daily with 15 minute consults going on every day (8:30 AM until 3:15 (we close at 12 on Wednesdays and don’t open on Sundays)).
We have a cat café program which is really amazing, its mainly done in all inclusive hotels like the Riu hotels and resorts . With this program we go into the hotel, trap all the cats, bring them here, they get sterilized, rabies, vaccinations, deparasited and then go back to the hotel. The hotels build really nice ‘Palapa Cat Cafés’ – little feeding stations and they feed the cats twice a day so it becomes a healthy, stable colony of cats, and they stop eating food from the restaurants. It’s win-win situation that works really well.
We also have a very small program for adoptable kittens, we have three adoption rooms which I’ll show you in a minute. We are not a shelter, because if we become a shelter, we will not be able to focus on spay and neuter and all our funding would go to food and medical care for them and we would not be solving the problem. By sterilizing we are working on the solution so we focus on that but we do have three adoptable kitten rooms. We have space for 15 kittens at a time.
Then we have our Cachito fund, which is a very small fund named after my dog, who passed away last year – Cachito. He was rescued 11 years ago and was in a terrible state. A donor heard about his story and decided to start very small fund for any of the Coco’s team members who rescue a dog, this fund is available to help with their medical care. The team member takes care of the dog in their home. We don’t usually have dogs staying at the clinic but as you can see we have two dogs here right now so sometimes we have had to make an exception. We try to really focus on the mission so as not to turn into a shelter.
Do you have any estimate of how many cats were roaming Playa when you moved in compared to now?
LR: Playa del Carmen is one of the fastest growing cities in the world and with this growth the animal population has exploded. It’s hard to know the approximate numbers. What I can say is had we not been here, things would be a lot worse. We’ve seen a big improvement in how people act and how animals are treated. Cats before were treated as vermin, they were killed, poisoned; now we’ve got people calling us saying “Hey! Can I borrow your trap? I want to TNR the cats that are outside my house.” Before it would have been that they wanted to kill them. A lot of the hotels used to poison the cats. One hotel manager even told me in an interview that they shot 80 cats as if it was nothing. We’ve seen a really big change in people’s attitudes. Of course there is still a lot of work to be done. I feel like it’s never ending because Playa has grown so much and there’s still so many people that don’t sterilize their animals so they continue reproducing.
What strikes me the most that you offer also free sterilization for those who can’t afford it for what I really just want to say thank you for.
LR: We send a message to everyone that asks for the minimum donation to cover our costs for a cat or a dog. Underneath that text it says if you can’t afford this then tell us as we have a limited number of free or donation based surgeries because we still want to help you. If we said free sterilization, then everybody is going to come and no one is going to give a donation. We try to ask the people that can afford it to cover the basic costs of the sterilization. That way we make sure we are helping the people and animals who need it the most.
Do you have any background check for adoptions?
LR: A few weeks ago someone on social media got really angry with us for asking for too many questions when we adopt kittens out. She wanted a kitten but didn’t agree on our adoption requirements. She thought that asking for a picture of her house and her electric bill was a security risk. We were of course just trying to make sure that the kitten was going to a good home. We do have a lot of requirements but it’s because we need to. Unfortunately, we have experienced some terrible cruelty, including people trying to adopt black cats to sacrifice on Halloween, and it’s because of this that we have such a strict adoption process.
We want our dogs and cats to go to people committed to their welfare. We therefore ask for a minimum donation of $ 300 pesos that includes: sterilization, first-year vaccinations, deworming and an ID tag as well as all necessary tests. Our requirements are:
Video of your house where doors, windows and patio are appreciated.
Fill out the adoption application
Copy or photo of your identification on both sides (Passport)
Copy or photo of proof of address
A home visit is made to finalize the adoption of dogs. Adopting a dog is a lifelong responsibility, as they can live for more than 20 years we ask people to consider this and that you can take your dog with you if you move from Playa in the future.
For cats we must make sure the windows are secure, that if they have a patio it is enclosed, we want cats to be inside cats.
How many animals do you have yourself?
LR: I have 2 cats: Luna and Pixie. I also run a cat hotel in my house, for people that go on holiday so I have plenty of animals. If I didn’t have the cat hotel, I might have had more pets myself, but there are plenty of cats at home.
When was the hardest period of time?
LR: When covid started, that was one of the hardest times. Trying to keep my staff safe at the same time as trying to make sure that we were still helping animals. It was clear the utmost priority had to be keeping our staff safe and then from there we needed to work out how we could continue helping the animals. We wrote extremely strict protocols, had to say goodbye to all our volunteers and made sure all the essential staff could get to work safely on bikes to not risk catching covid on public transport. Bikes were donated and things came together very quickly. At the beginning of the pandemic we only attended to urgent care cases, we had the help of Dr Erika from IFAW, who came everyday to help us. One of our vets was high risk so we had to keep her protected and safe. It was a very hard moment in time because everybody was scared, we needed to help the animals who were being abandoned because people were leaving Playa. We had to balance keeping everybody safe while offering care for these animals. This was why at the start of covid we paused our sterilization clinic and worked on all the urgent medical care for those that had lost their jobs, had no money and had sick pet. We focused on urgent sterilizations, urgent surgeries and urgent medical care. It was a really hard moment, but it was also a really good moment that united our team as we all came together and worked really hard.
I think that one of the hardest ongoing challenges of Coco’s is raising money for something that doesn’t tug at the heart strings. If we were a shelter and I showed a video of 100 dogs needing food, everybody would donate, but when you say donate to Coco’s so we can sterilize a bunch of animals is not something that you think “Oh, I must donate because they need to sterilize all those animals”. It is really hard to raise funds for sterilization. People want to donate to a puppy that got run over or the kittens that got rescued but our main goal is sterilization and what we mainly need is funding for our ongoing sterilization program. Raising money is one of the biggest challenges for Coco’s. You are not showing pictures of injured or starving animals . However if we sterilize all the animals there won’t be anymore puppies needing help, or dogs without food. What we are trying to do is to bring a solution via prevention. Getting people to realize this and donate is definitely a big challenge.
What keeps you going when it’s hard?
LR: My team! I would say my Coco’s Family, because we are more of a family than a team and I mean that. I know it might seem a little corny but it’s true and we keep each other going and of course my love for the animals.
If you weren’t doing this, what would you do? Anything in the world…
LR: I would love to have a house big enough to foster or adopt children that have nowhere to go. That is a dream of mine. I love children and I would love to help them as well. We managed to do some events for children with Coco’s, We’ve been to the poor communities and have given out Christmas presents, food, shoes and clothes. We have taken a Dr out with us to give consults for the families, and vets to help their animals. We have managed to join the two together. It’s impossible to only help animals when you see so many people also in need. We have also worked educating children on animal welfare by visiting schools and by showing them a fun puppet show that talks about animal welfare and what cats and dogs need in a fun way.
Tell me more about the community outreach program.
LR: Years ago there was a jaguar that attacked some dogs in the invasion area of Playa del Carmen. Right at the back of Playa there are these electrical lines and underneath them all the way along people have built little shacks and it’s called ‘invasores’. A little boy came into Coco’s when we were in the old clinic and said, “I need to kill this jaguar that killed my dog!” We talked to him and explained that jaguars are an endangered species and how killing it wasn’t an option. With help from IFAW we started working in the area sterilizing the animals and making sure they had basic medical care going there with IFAW once a month to help the animals. The jaguar was eventually relocated by the correct government authorities.
Do you have any activities for kids from Playa?
LR: We have had many activities for kids in the past , we’ve been to schools to talk to the children, we have had puppet shows that teach the kids about animal welfare in a fun way, we’ve also had kitten cuddling every Saturday but this has all been paused because of Covid. Now our whole team is fully vaccinated as of November we are going to start accepting volunteers who are fully vaccinated to come to cuddle our kittens again with our protocols in place.
If you could put one message on a billboard here in Playa, what would it be?
LR: I always think that sterilization is so important so I think it would have to do something with sterilization, and it would be something like “Help us help them, prevent the unwanted animals from suffering on the street! Sterilize your animal today. Sterilization is the solution! Contact us.”
What are Coco’s short term and long term plans for the future and your ultimate goal?
LR: Continue as we are, that would be short term. Long term, would be to increase the number of animals we sterilize, help as many animals as possible and to educate as many people as we can. I hope we can do the big sterilization clinics again which hasn’t been possible because of covid. We used to do a big spay and neuter clinic once a year where we did over 1000 animals in 4 days! Those clinics are simply the best! I love organizing them.
Excuse me, once again?
LR: To spay 1000 animals. Well, we did 1273 sterilizations in four days and those clinics days make such a difference. We go to a school in poor area of Playa, we’ve been to Villas del Sol, Colosio and Las Flores, we go the day before and we set the whole clinic up. We turn a classroom into a surgical room, another room into prep room…so it’s a huge thing! We need at least a 100 people between the recovery, the vets, reception staff to make this a success. It’s amazing, it’s the best week of the year, it’s my favourite thing to do! The goal would be to be able to do that again. I am hoping to do one in 2022 but it all depends on covid and if we are able to use the schools, but that is definitely a goal. As funding allows – to help as many animals as we can.
What kind of support do you need the most right now?
LR: We mainly need volunteers for prep and recovery, where you prepare animals for surgery or you are looking after animals while they are waking up from surgery and of course donations to continue offering free or low-cost sterilization. The more donations we have coming in the more animals we can help.
What is required for the volunteers?
LR: We require volunteers to have two vaccines and to wear a surgical mask or an N95 mask.
Volunteers receive training depending on what area they want to help in.
Prep – preparation is getting the animal ready for surgery. Volunteers need more experience for this job. Some people have a medical background as previous experience is great. We have had volunteers who over time have learnt prep. In Mexico the position of veterinary technician doesn’t exist. We have volunteers and staff who are trained and of course they always supervised by our vets. Prep involves shaving the animal ready for surgery, putting in the Et tube, putting the catheter in and injecting pain meds and antibiotics.
Recovery is looking after the animals after surgery as they start to wake up. Breathing and temperature have to be checked regularly, and the animal stroked, to speed up waking from the anesthetic. The et tube has to be removed, sub cutaneous fluids given, ears checked, and also checked for fleas and ticks.. Anybody who wants to work in recovery will do a course with our Medical Director first to learn about all the steps needed and then would be paired up with someone experienced. It takes time to learn everything.
We also need volunteers to come and socialize the rescued kittens we have up for adoption or to walk the dogs that we sometimes have waiting to be adopted.
Can it be two different people, one for prep and one for recovery?
LR: It has to be. You can’t do both those things at the same time. You can learn both but not on the same day. You have to be in one area. Often our recovery people don’t do prep because they would rather be with the animals while they wake up from surgery and then our prep volunteers find recovery boring and they want to be in prep. Usually people have a preference of where they want to be.
Any last message to Playenses?
LR: Helping us helps so many. When you are sterilizing the animals you are really focusing on a solution to the problem. And even though it may not tug on the heart strings, in the bigger picture, you are helping more. You are preventing what tugs on the heart strings. And that is an important message.
