Taking up the cudgels for animals

"Most people take in to account how much money they earn, but for me it's a count of how many lives I've saved," said Manoj Oswal (33)u00a0 the first member of The Pune Chapter of People For Animals.

Manoj could not hide the earnestness in his voice as he spoke about his pet subject fighting for animal rights.
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He explained, "The Pune Chapter of People For Animals was started with me, as a sole member, in 1995. The NGO is actually headed by Maneka Gandhi, who is well-known for her dedicated service to animal welfare."u00a0

The aim of this group is to protect and fight for animal rights. This fact came out clearly in his talk u2014 a feeling that was shared by Anil Kataria (53) a businessman, who works for this cause.

"There are three core areas," he pointed out. The first is a full-fledged ambulance service u2014 that picks up animals. On an average, he said that they pick up around 100 animals a month, either sick or injured, most of them being accident cases or abandoned. "We treat them in the three major animal hospitals and then release them from where we had got them," he said.

Explaining the second core area, which is law enforcement, he said, "We sometimes deal with ordinary cases where societies do not allow anyone to keep pets." He added, "It's illegal not to allow a pet. But today, we have changed the attitude of about 30 societies. These are smaller cases in law enforcement, larger cases are when we go undercover and discover animal abuse or organised trade, as we did in the case of some turtles and snakes," he elaborated. "Then, we also stop illegal slaughter of animals," he said.

"The third area is promotion of vegetarianism, and we do not use anything of animals like using leather, silk, even milk or milk products."

Some of their achievements are stopping open trade of parrots, turtles from pet shops, killing of strays and bullock cart races too. "We keep a constant vigil on government agencies that implement animal laws and help them when required," Manoj said. He added that they would be setting up an ultra-modern animal hospital in Kondhwa, in the next three months.