Pet rescue emerges as a humanitarian priority: how the Hachiko Foundation helps animals amid the fighting

During the Helsinki Commission podcast, Nate Mook described how a small, improvised pet-rescue effort in eastern Ukraine grew into a formal charity the interview identifies as the Hachiko Foundation.

Mook said volunteers encountered large numbers of abandoned pets in newly liberated towns and improvised feeding solutions using plumbing tubes as gravity-fed feeders. “We literally went to a plumbing store in Kramatorsk...and we set up these feeding tubes and the next morning...these dogs had lined up, like, in a queue to eat from one of these feeding tubes,” he said.

What began as an improvised fix, Mook said, drew public interest and donations. He described establishing a Ukrainian charity and a U.S. 501(c)(3), hiring about a 12-person Ukrainian team, buying vans and retrofitting an ambulance for veterinary care and sterilization on the front lines. “We have a team now of about 12 people, all Ukrainians...we retrofitted an ambulance to be able to do some medical treatment and sterilization,” Mook said.

Mook credited corporate donations — he named Purina — and volunteer support for helping scale the effort to daily operations in Donetsk, Kharkiv and Zaporizhzhia regions. He said the initiative provides pet food, medicine, feeding stations and rescues, and that military units sometimes distribute supplies where civilian teams cannot safely enter.

Mook framed the effort as both a direct humanitarian intervention for animals and a way to sustain broader public engagement with Ukraine. “Pets are impacted by war, just as people are,” he said, adding that animal projects can keep people connected to the country’s needs when public attention wanes.

Mook closed by stressing that the domestic Ukrainian staff leading the work are the real heroes, and that small, visible acts can create durable community benefits amid the conflict.