The community of animal caregivers

The technical aspects of sterilisation and vaccination lie beyond the competency of the authorities, who need to work in tandem with dog feeders and animal welfare NGOs

- Rudraneil Sengupta

Almost 20 years ago, a dog walked into our life—me and my wife's—and changed everything. She was emaciated, almost at the point of death, and we saw her walking slowly, painfully, down the road from the balcony of our rented apartment. We rushed to feed her—something, anything.

We did not know then how that one act would transform our lives, become an almost all-consuming passion, a mission, and the very definition of who we are.

We are feeders.

We take responsibility for 80 dogs in our neighbourhood. Which means that we have sterilised each one of these 80 dogs and we vaccinate them every year. At first, we did this with our own money. Later, as some people in the neighbourhood learnt about what we do, they kindly pooled in.

When we began, almost all dogs in the neighbourhood were unsterilised, and no one knew anything about their vaccination status. Over a period of about six years, without any help from government agencies like the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD), we managed to complete the task.

Most of that time, we worked in the shadows. We still go out for feeding at set times when we know the likelihood of meeting other people is negligible—because early encounters with people had taught us that we could be subjected to sudden explosions of rage and harassment for helping dogs.

It took a long time for us to come out of our shells and stand up for what we were doing. It took painstaking, and sometimes painful, engagement with the people who opposed us to slowly build consensus, to spread awareness about the ways to cohabit with community animals, to shift perspectives even by just a little, to chip away at the irrational core of their fear of dogs, and to convince them that animal caregivers and those who are afraid of dogs essentially want the same thing—an end to human-animal conflicts, a reduction in the population of dogs, and, most critically, a total absence of rabies.