When 10-year-old Cheetha, a retired police dog from Bengaluru, arrived at YODA’s shelter home in Khar last weekend, she seemed overwhelmed by her surroundings. For the most part, Cheetha kept to herself. "She was quite nervous. If someone approached her, she would try and avoid them. She didn’t warm up to people, though she was perfectly fine around the other cats and dogs," recalls Priya Hebbar, co-founder of YODA. But something miraculous happened over the week. "The ambulance driver, who had brought Cheetha to Mumbai, came over one day, and sat next to her. Within a few minutes, she walked towards him, and put her head on his lap. We realised that she wanted affection, but just didn’t know how. Her anxiety is slowly melting away."

Cheetha, a Labrador, was formerly part of an explosives and drug detection team. She, along with nine others from Bengaluru, are now being brought to Mumbai, so that they can be rehomed, and live their retirement years with new pet parents. The initiative is the brainchild of YODA, a city-based rehabilitation centre for animals. 
"For long, we’ve been thinking about how we can rehome working or police dogs, once they have completed their 10-year service. But the idea really took root, when an animal lover from Bengaluru reached out to us, saying they had visited a shelter that kept retired dogs, and if we could find individual homes for them," adds Hebbar. The team at YODA shared a social media post with photos of the ‘veterans’. Within a span of hours, they received over a hundred queries from families across Mumbai.