Over 50,000 hungry street dogs get home-delivered meals from Blue Cross of India during Covid-19 lockdown

Hunger has no pause button, especially for the street animals that thrived in an ecosystem that was upended by the lockdown that began more than a month ago.  But animal welfare organisations like Blue Cross of India have yet again come to their rescue; this time with a first of its kind program to reduce their hunger – BCI calls it ‘Karuna.’

As of 30th April, Blue Cross of India cooked and helped serve 52,186 meals to street animals.

Vignesh, an animal lover from Tiruverkadu ranks at the top of the Blue Cross list of citizen community feeders. He has fed over 3,300 animals from the food donated by the organization since the initiative began the day after the lockdown. Kind-hearted people like Vignesh, Devi (Ambattur, over 3,000 animals) and Sowmya (Puzhudivakkam, over 2,500 animals) are part of a long list of 115-plus citizen community feeders who signed up to be part of BCI’s citizen community feeder network.

Aaditya, a resident of Tambaram who was home cooking and feeding street animals in his neighbourhood, started as a community feeder. Now, he is a full time volunteer for Blue Cross of India, who spends the entire day distributing food on one of the four routes the organization operates. He says, “I thought to myself – if it was so tough for me to cook and feed 50 animals, how complex it would be for the Blue Cross to do this for thousands! So I decided to help.”

Many new volunteers like Shrey and Bhargav have signed up during this crisis to help while other long time volunteers like Neelakantan and Vaijayanthi are a regular part of this team now.

Vinod Kumar, General Manager – Admin, Blue Cross of India, says, “On the day of the lockdown, the first thing we did was to change our helpdesk announcement, urging callers to feed the strays on their streets. The feeding program from our end started the second day after the lockdown and has now covered many areas in the city.”

Four batches of food are cooked every day – Hotel Green Park helps with one, while the in-house team at BCI’s Guindy campus cooks the other three. This includes food for the 2,000-plus in-house animals as well. In total about 3,000 meals are cooked fresh every day while following strict hygiene and health safety protocol.

“Much of this is made possible with the support of our donors and patrons like Help Animals India based in Seattle USA, Four Paws International, HCL Foundation and local support from Aavin, Jain International Trade Organization, Aranya Foundation and Tamil Nadu Animal Welfare Board, who have donated in kind,” adds Vinod.

Velu TM, Manager – Special Operations says, “We initially began feeding animals ourselves, in non-residential localities, but realised it will not be feasible to cover more areas. We created overnight what we call the most critical ‘last mile’ – a network of citizen feeders, who complement us in what is emerging as one of the best example of deep community participation in a crisis of unprecedented magnitude. We have over 115 citizen feeders, who we supply the food to every day on four different routes that covers many localities of Chennai.”

The reach of the feeding program has spread as far as Puzhal lake area north Chennai, Tiruverkadu in the west, Sholinganallur along OMR and Selayiur/Tambaram in the south. “Some community feeders pitch in with food cooked in their homes as well, on days when we’re unable to provide meals.”

Good Samaritans who see animals starving and wish to feed may sign up to be on the Blue Cross of India feeder network at https://bci.clappia.com/app/COL077109. “Demand far outstrips supply but we try our best to balance by alternating, rationing and advising feeders on frugal serving,” adds Velu.

Dawn William, General Manager – Disaster Management and Rescues, says: “Our day starts at 3 am as we need to cook many batches of meals, load up, leave early and finish distribution/feeding before it gets too hot outside. Our kitchen runs without a break these days as we need to care for and feed the over 2,000 hospital and shelter animals too. We didn’t think we had the manpower or the cooking capacity to pull off this operation, but every available employee and volunteer has stepped up; every available resource is going into dealing with this emergency.”