It was Gandhi who said “the greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated,” believing firmly in the overarching values of compas-sion and equity for all living beings. And yet, in India today, urbanization has increased human-animal conflict to a great extent, especially in the case of street dogs. While some would want to wish the issue away, there is always a small group of residents in every colony who come together to try and resolve the situation. Plus, our laws recognise the right of animals to exist peacefully and cruelty-free, and it is our duty to ensure these laws are followed. This spirit of community and love for animals is the glue that has inspired a small group of Vasant Vihar residents to come together to form the VV Animal Lovers Group.
This group was formed in 2016-2017 by a few like-minded friends with the common goal of ensuring that street dogs do not starve or be deprived of medical assistance. It has slowly grown over the years, with more residents joining in, to include an occasional episode of cattle in need of emergency help, sometimes a cat or two and on rare occasion, a bird.
People volunteer to become part of it purely by word of mouth, driven by compassion towards these voiceless beings. In the natural process of coming together, different people take on different tasks, depending on time and resources available to them – active feeding, medical resources, fundraising, interacting with other groups, and so on. Ours is not a structured organisation but a simple coming together of community members on a voluntary and spontaneous basis.
Our charter is simple – provide regular meals to the ‘streeties’, do annual vaccination drives, sterilize the animals at the appropriate time to ensure that the population remains contained. This is a well-recognised method of ensuring the healthy and safe co-existence of humans and animals. Alarmingly, an increasing number of medical emergencies now include accident victims, a fallout of the new craze for high -speed driving. This is where the group members help out selflessly – contacting a vet, ensuring the dog is taken to the doctor in time, receiving proper medical care including surgery if needed, followed by after-care. This means that we have to outsource their recovery to some reliable boarding facility as these dogs would need nursing until healed. (By now we have a directory of numbers on call, which also includes animal ambulances and some known compassionate animal taxi services).
Sadly, in addition over the past 3-4 years, we are seeing dogs being abandoned on roads, parks, and colonies far from their homes – on some pretext or the other. This is an increasing trend now, especially in the post-Covid era. It is one of the hardest things to see: a lost child (because dogs are like babies, so dependent on their owners) crying for its parents, disoriented and terrified. We try hard to first locate its human parents, in the hope that the dog has lost its bearings and is only missing and not abandoned. Alternately, we try and get a good foster home and/or permanent home for it. Some of the group members are kind enough to volunteer for the fostering sometimes, as finding a new home is a long, heartbreaking and often unsuccessful process.
All this costs a lot of money and we stay afloat financially by personal contributions from our own group, with an occasional small fund-raising drive. It is challenging and relentless and often we are the receiving end of criticism from irate residents. Our appeal to such people is to reach out someone from the animal group in the colony and try and find a reasonable solution within law rather than perpetuating hate or cruelty upon the poor dog. The most important thing to remember is that not just us, but all animal volunteer groups are driven by no other feeling except compassion. There is no ulterior motive. While we recognise that sometimes some dogs can get aggressive, it is equally important to investigate why this is happening. Animal groups like ours can act as intermediaries to resolve such issues in a harmonious manner in such cases, within reasonable limits.
Our appeal is – please be careful and kind towards animals. Remember that they have a right to live a decent, cruelty free life as much as we have. And try to resolve such conflicts in the best way possible, working alongside the small animal groups in your colonies like ours, always being aware that this is a voluntary action on part of people who take time out of their busy lives, often opening their purses to ensure that animals are not hurt. Just be kind.
