Cora Bailey

For more than 30 years Cora Bailey, 71, has helped people and their pets in places plagued by poverty, crime and violence on the West Rand. She and Devilliers Katywa started Community Led Animal Welfare (CLAW) during the political violence in the 1990s. Cora ran the local SPCA and received a call from a police officer asking her to help the animals in Swaneville, near Krugersdorp.

On 12 May 1991, more than 48 people were killed, others wounded and their homes burnt. Their owners had fled without their pets. Cora rescued about 200 dogs that day. She knew she couldn’t attend to animals alone in the face of grinding poverty so CLAW’s mantra is: “At the end of every leash there is an owner.”

Claw has a shelter in Durban Deep. It provides veterinary care, does adoptions and runs a mobile veterinary clinic. It’s a refuge for people, too. During Covid, hundreds of hungry people were fed every day. CLAW’s humanitarian support continues. It distributes food, clothes and blankets, runs community gardens, helps child-headed households, teaches people how to care for the sick and advocates for rape victims’ rights.

Cora is at the coalface of human and animal suffering in some of the city’s most neglected and deprived areas. She is the first person people call for help. And she always answers.

No individual can save the world but everyone can act in a way that, added together, can save some part of the world.
To make South Africa a better place where resources, opportunities and security are equitably distributed there needs to be a change of consciousness at the most fundamental level so that those values become part of everyone's common sense. If that happens then the greed, corruption and theft of public goods and the violent inequality that threatens this country will end.
To make South Africa a better place where resources, opportunities and security are equitably distributed there needs to be a change of consciousness at the most fundamental level so that those values become part of everyone's common sense. If that happens then the greed, corruption and theft of public goods and the violent inequality that threatens this country will end.