Three bow-wows to a two-year-old initiative in a Chennai neighbourhood

Happy Paws Mogappair which celebrated its second anniversary recently illustrates what can be achieved if resident-volunteers sedulously apply themselves to monitoring and caring for the canine population in their midst

The descriptor “resident-volunteers” rarely goes with animal rescues. Loosely-formed animal welfare groups usually operate without a fixed pincode through members scattered across geographies. In that sense, Happy Paws Mogappair attempted something that seemed both endearingly and dauntingly left-field. It sought to make animal welfare the workaday concern of a neighbourhood and its residents, and it seems to have succeeded in this objective to a good extent.

The group employs “neighbourhood animal welfare” as an umbrella term denoting a “compassionate community” whose heart skips a beat when an animal in distress hobbles into sight — four-legged or feathered or with any other qualifiers.

However, in practical everyday terms, it is usually about watching out for neighbourhood dogs the way one would for one’s human dependants. Drilling down to the bedrock of details, it is about resident-volunteers sedulously caring for diseased and injured dogs by ensuring their treatment, and attending to the sterilisation and vaccination of dogs found in their streets.