MUMBAI: Zota Healthcare has a retail business called Davaindia, which has been running its #CareForAllcampaign – a community-based shelter and medical response to help with humane care for stray animals throughout the country. As part of this campaign, Davaindia has been systematically establishing outdoor low-cost, weather-proof enclosures that double as feeding stations outside its COCO stores, providing safe areas for community dogs while ensuring they are fed, cared for, and protected from weather extremities. The #CareForAll campaign also partners and works closely with veterinary practitioners, and NGOs focused on animal-welfare to provide humane uptake, vaccination, sterilisation, and sheltering for animals needing long-term shelter. Building on this well-established network and consistent and successful model, #CareForAll is currently embarking on significant scaling in light of the recent order of the Supreme Court of India that ordered no stray dogs remain in Delhi-NCR within eight weeks, with a planned humane approach to adaptation and shelter guarantee.
Experts and civic authorities caution that acting in large numbers without proper planning can result in public health and welfare issues from outbreaks of disease to what ecologists refer to as the “vacuum effect,” whereby territorial, vaccinated dogs will be removed and unvaccinated, potentially more aggressive animals will enter the cleared space. Davaindia states that its programme provides a sheltering model with immediate action, mass vaccinations, and sterilisation in specific areas so communities will be safer humanely.
Talking on behalf of DavaIndia, Healthcare group CEO Dr.Sujit Paul stated that “Neutering and spaying of dogs is the only sustainable method of mitigating litter at the source — and that, if undertaken in a systemic manner, the communities will be stabilised in a decade, with spay/neuter averages of aprox ₹1000–₹2000 per animal being small costs relative to the human and animal suffering we are preventing. India lacks shelter infrastructure to humanely house millions of stray animals, which is why DavaIndia is trying to address the issue with a community shelter operation at company stores and mass vaccination campaigns. We must also avoid the vacuum effect — i.e. removing territorial attendant to unvaccinated dogs to occupy their territory creating exposure to zoonotic outbreaks of leptospirosis, mange, parvovirus, etc. During visits to South Africa (content that supports community based sheltering in pet food stores) and Georgia (rural community program) I observed radio/RFID tagging and also willing to pilot microchipping and RFID linkage with municipal records whenever possible (to improve accountability and follow up care)”.
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