BANGALORE, INDIA – A skinny brown dog, not more than 7 or 8 months old, stands patiently outside a small food stall. He looks longingly at the plates of the people who are eating their quick morning breakfast.
When it’s obvious no one will be offering him any scraps after a few more minutes of waiting, he moves on to the nearby community trash can and continues his search.
Bangalore, a populous city in southern India, is known as the Silicon Valley of India for its information technology sector. Yet countless strays roam its streets.
Achala Paani has been working with homeless dogs for more than 12 years. She says she was in college when she found a stray dog with health problems that inspired her to do more.
The tall and soft-spoken dog lover with big eyes quit her job at the time to take the dog, Babe, in. She cared for Babe for seven months until the stray dog recovered.
She says that Babe’s recovery moved her and made her realize that she could do anything she set her mind to.
“I believe in miracles,” she says with conviction.
After graduating from college, she started Let’s Live Together, a nongovernmental organization and animal adoption center for abandoned dogs, in 2009.
A member of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, she says that some people feel sad when they see homeless dogs but do not know how to help. So her organization offers them a platform to rescue, foster or adopt the dogs.
Wearing black jeans and a black T-shirt, Paani says that her organization screens potential adopters strictly to ensure that the dogs will be happy and safe in their new homes. She has also trained two more volunteers who check in on the dogs’ well-being in their foster or adoptive homes.
If the foster or adoptive parents can't afford to spay or neuter the dogs, her organization helps them to do so. She says that it is the responsibility of the entire community – not just the government – to spay and neuter street dogs.
Paani’s passion for her work is evident when she talks. It also shows in the tattoo at the base of her left thumb of her organization’s symbol: a human footprint along with two tiny dog paws. She designs and sells merchandise with the logo such as clothing, bags and calendars to generate funds for her organization.
Paani has received numerous awards for her work in this field. She has coordinated the adoption of about 360 homeless dogs and the fostering of some 1,000 dogs. Paani fosters them as well, once taking 12 dogs into her home at the same time.
“It completes me,” she says compassionately.
India’s large stray dog population draws complaints from citizens that they bark, bite and carry rabies. In response to these complaints, the government is promoting birth control instead of culling, or killing, the stray dogs. Nongovernmental organizations are also working to spay and neuter dogs as well as to arrange for fostering and adoption. Animal lovers who have fostered and adopted stray dogs say it’s a rewarding experience.
There are about 35 million stray dogs in India, according to Animal Birth Control India, a program under the Animal Welfare Board of India, an advisory board to the government.
Parviz Ahmed Piran, joint director of the Bangalore municipal government’s Animal Husbandry Department, says that people complain that stray dogs bark and bite them. He calls these complaints amusing.
“It’s a dog’s nature to bark,” he says, “and they, like any, will attack only when they are provoked.”
He says that some community members create unnecessary hype about the need to cull stray dogs. But he remains strongly against killing them, emphasizing their contribution to society.
“People do not see the positive aspect of having stray dogs,” he says. “They stop chain-snatching and other robbery on the streets. Because of them, the organic garbage in the dustbins does not rot.”
He says that he has visited a few sites to check on cases of dogs biting people. But he has routinely found that the incidences occurred because the people had provoked the dogs.
Piran says that during the last two years, the number of dogs who have received vaccinations and birth control has increased in Bangalore. The incidence of human death because of rabies has also decreased.
Ramesh Denagere, manager at Compassion Unlimited Plus Action, an animal welfare organization in Bangalore, credits the government’s Animal Birth Control program and the hard work of nongovernmental organizations to implement it.
“The government has assigned the Animal Birth Control program to many NGOs,” he says.
Compassion Unlimited Plus Action is one of these.
The birth control program encourages a catch-and-neuter approach to strays, rather than the catch-and-kill method. The goal is to dramatically reduce the breeding and overpopulation of strays as well as to vaccinate them to reduce the number of human rabies cases as a result of dog bites.
The government and various nongovernmental organizations have implemented the program in more than 60 cities across India, according to the Animal Welfare Board of India.
In addition to the organizations selected to implement the government program, various others are working to reduce the stray dog population through spaying, neutering and adoption.
Neha Gowda, a corporate professional, volunteers with The Voice of Stray Dogs, a nongovernmental organization in Bangalore that provides medical care for sick stray dogs. It has also been able to find homes for some of them as well as works to sensitize the community about stray dogs.
“Some kids are scared,” Gowda says. “They think [the] dog is dangerous and have fear. We do lot of awareness programs in schools.”
Dr. Vaibhav Jamma, 33, the director of The Voice of Stray Dogs, says that the organization has a small rescue shelter for the dogs. Rakesh Shukla, a software entrepreneur who started the organization, attends all calls for dog rescues.
Jamma has spayed and neutered more than 40 dogs since joining the organization in May 2012. On a recent Friday, Jamma performed a spaying operation on Sindy, a stray dog.
Wani Shankar, a middle-aged woman, is fostering Sindy until the organization finds her a permanent home. After the surgery, Jamma answered Shankar’s questions and assured her that the dog would be fine.
Precious Paws, a nongovernmental organization, and Krupa Loving Animals, an animal hospital and shelter, are two other organizations in Bangalore that have stepped forward to help homeless dogs find a home. Some stray dogs that they rescue are born on the streets, while owners have abandoned others.
Aditi Sengupta, a freelance soft skills trainer in Bangalore, fosters stray dogs while Precious Paws finds homes for them.
She currently has 11 dogs living in her home. Five she owns: Happy, Handsome, Nikkie, Cutie and Jaanu. She is fostering the other six: Boyzee, Dino, Pixi, Prince, Rancho and Tinkerbell.
She pauses to give medicine to Happy, who has cancer. A vet frequently visits her home to check on the dogs’ health.
Sengupta says that the first stray dog that she fostered was named Frisky. Because she was a female, it was difficult to find her a home. She says that people prefer to adopt male dogs because they can’t get pregnant, remembering one woman who refused to adopt Frisky because of her sex.
Sengupta says she wants all her foster dogs to receive a home where their owners love and care for them, so she doesn’t want the organization to rush their adoptions. She says she loves all her dogs as if they were her babies.
Sohini Bhattacharya, 21, adopted a 5-month-old dog earlier this year that Precious Paws had rescued. She named the energetic dog Oli.
She says that a volunteer working with Precious Paws rescued the dog because the original owners were mistreating her. When she met Oli, the dog was scared after the abuse she had suffered. But she says that within a day of her adoption and coming home, the dog became friendly toward all.
Pavan Kumar, 26, a young professional, has been fostering a 3-month-old dog named Shraddha for three months now. He received Shraddha from Paani’s organization, Let's Live Together.
He says that initially, he wanted to adopt a pet but decided to foster a dog first in order to gain experience. Shraddha has been to a few adoption camps, but no one has adopted her yet.
Meanwhile, Kumar says he is happy fostering her and that it’s been a wonderful and rewarding experience.
