Four Indie dogs are travel buddies of their pet parents as they travel across the country on foot, bicycle and motorbikes

Indie dogs Butter, Bella, Charlie & Veeran are living their best lives, travelling with their human companions & experiencing adventure. Yati Gaur, Sureng Rajkonwar & @fotopeedika have modified their trips & taken precautions to ensure their safety. #TravelPups #AdventureDogs #IndieDogs

Butter, Bella, Charlie and Veeran are Indie dogs, all rescued, adopted and living in different parts of the country. Their stories of finding forever homes are very different but what binds them is their many adventures on the road as they travel with their human companions.

Yati Gaur, @theunfoldingplay on Instagram, travels on foot. He estimates to have covered around 10,000 kilometres over the past three years, ever since he started walking during the pandemic. On one such ‘trip’ in 2021, walking through Rajasthan, a little Indie pup joined him.

“I just couldn’t leave Buttercup behind; so I adopted her and carried her along with me on the onward journey,” he says. Since Butter (as the two-year-old is now known) was barely three months old and too little to accompany him on his subsequent trips, he left her home with his family in Noida.

“She would stop eating each time I left and be quite lonely without me. That’s when I decided I would take her along with me once she was old enough and ready,” says Yati, who has been on the road with Butter for the past 274 days or nine months. He wants to give her the best, adventure-filled life possible. On this trip with Butter, on his itinerary are Badrinath, Dwarka, Puri and Rameshwaram, besides the 12 Jyotyirlingas scattered across the country.  

Before setting off on this trip he trained her, tested her endurance to see how she would handle being on foot for extended periods of time. “I took her to the Himalayas for three to four months to get an idea about her stamina, that is if she could manage without water for some time on warm days, or stay without food.”

Butter’s maiden trip has not been without mishaps. She was attacked by a pack of dogs, causing Yati to ‘lose’ her for several hours. When he found her she was injured and an infection caused by shoddy treatment led to her tail being amputated.

Finding a good doctor willing to treat Butter, who was in pain, was an effort. But he finally found one, with a soft corner for Indies, in Bhubaneshwar. The veterinarian also gave him a box of emergency medicine for Butter.  The treatment-related rest led them to take a 15-day break. Subsequently he started leashing Butter, “an inconvenience for both, but inevitable.”