Animals & Us
Why every dog deserves to be loved with Lya Battle • Animals & Us E19
Lya Battle
Lya Battle built a sanctuary for 2,000 strays by refusing to accept that abandonment had to be permanent.
Kintsugi Studio
Animals & Us
Lya Battle
Lya Battle built a sanctuary for 2,000 strays by refusing to accept that abandonment had to be permanent.
You don't have to be in crisis to call.
Lya Battle grew up in Ghana with a biologist father who taught her that every creature deserved respect and had a place in the world. By kindergarten, she was fighting classmates who destroyed anthills, learning early that cruelty often came from ignorance rather than intent. When she moved back to Costa Rica as a child, she didn't yet see the dogs living on the streets as homeless. It took one abandoned dog with an injured eye to change everything. After veterinary treatment, no one came to claim him. Lya realised people could abandon animals, and that shelters and kill facilities were not the answer. She made a choice that would reshape her life: any dog that came to her would stay until it found a home.
Within years, her small backyard housed over 100 dogs. When a neighbour's construction forced them to move, her husband Álvaro proposed converting her family's abandoned mountain farm into a sanctuary instead of watching more dogs die on the street. Lya named it Territorio Saguates, deliberately reclaiming a local slur for street dogs to teach people these animals were valuable survivors, not garbage. She discovered that free-range dogs, spayed and neutered in large numbers, didn't turn savage but stayed pack-oriented and content. Today the sanctuary cares for around 2,000 dogs across 355 acres.
The government has fought her at every turn, even reclassifying the sanctuary as an amusement park because they had no category for what she had built. Lya credited her ADHD and a childhood where nothing was treated as a disaster with giving her the focus and stubborness to keep going. She works a full-time job, donates everything beyond her own bare expenses to the dogs, and has never taken a salary. Visitors often cry walking through the mountains with the pack, overwhelmed by how many dogs have no homes and by how broken the system is. Her final message is simple: humans created dogs and bred them into dependence on us. We made them homeless. We have the tools and empathy to fix it. We must.
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