Rescue
It began in the late 1990s with a group of friends, a landline number and a refusal to walk past an injured animal. Today it is a 250+ volunteer operation under a registered charitable trust, run on purpose-built systems.
How it started
Around the end of the 1990s, a group of friends saw two things at once: injured animals on the streets of Surat, and an indifferent public response. We began treating them ourselves, within our means, and published our landline numbers asking people to call when an animal needed help.
There were no mobile phones. When pager services arrived we published a pager number instead, and called the pager company every half hour to ask whether any page had come in for an animal in need — then went to the spot.
The team grew, and so did the technology. Today we are more than 250 volunteers under a registered charitable trust, working professionally with high-end systems in place. That is how we have been able to do justice to more than 35,000 rescue calls for animals, birds and reptiles since May 2006.
In the early years we did not keep track of all rescue work. Record keeping started after the trust was formally established, so the count for previous years is not known to us.
Rescue log since 2011
Every call has been logged digitally since 2011. Figures below are pulled live from our case log, ResQuark.
| Year | Animals | Birds | Snakes | Other | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Rescue log figures are not available right now — please check back shortly. | |||||
Being un-reasonable
Challenges bring out the best in us. We never say no to a difficult task — and we are routinely un-reasonable, doing things most people would not attempt.
We never turn a call away for want of resources. We work 24 hours, and in no case does a call go unanswered — at any hour of the day or night.
We don't treat and leave the animal to its destiny. Where needed we take it to hospital and bear the full cost of treatment, heal it completely at our shelter, then rehabilitate it.
Where only on-spot treatment is required, we give the caretaker or sensitive people nearby the instructions and medication needed to see the treatment through.
Association with FIAPO and the Wildlife Trust of India gives us expert guidance whenever a case calls for it.
Equipment & techniques
Alongside the team and its skills, we have built capacity in equipment. The emphasis on specialised gear and technique is deliberate — it is what lets a volunteer force work like a professional service.
- Smart and effective work
- Motivation for the team
- Solutions to difficult challenges
- Safety of the team
- Making the work easy so more people can take part
We work in association with organisations that give us expert guidance whenever it is needed:
Found an animal in distress?
Call the helpline first — a volunteer answers day or night. For anything that isn’t urgent, file the details online and we will follow up.