My story centers around a man, Sandip Karan, whose love for street dogs knows no bounds. His home-cum-kennel houses 40 street dogs that are mostly sick. Some have lost their legs, some suffer from liver ailments and some have cancer, but they are treated with a rare care and compassion by this selftaught veterinarian who learned his lessons while assisting veterinary surgeons for years.
Now confident enough to successfully perform surgeries, Sandip Karan is lucky to have found assistants in his mother Saraswati and wife Moumita. He says he is not doing any charity but only his duty. He does not believe in chaining the animals or caging them. They are left free to roam around and take rest in any part of his house. Quite popular in his locality in Kolkata as the ‘street dog doctor’, Sandip loves to cook food for his four-legged patients.
When called to treat a street dog in a faraway place, he sometimes brings home his ‘patient’ if the situation demands ‘hospitalisation’. He ensures its safe journey to the place it came from after recuperating. He has, till date, treated around 2500 street dogs in his own locality and around. Half of his patients had cancer–those having vincristine cancer have been cured. Not all his neighbors take kindly to his work though, he had to face their wrath on many occasions. However, that does not prevent him from dreaming of a house (he does not want to call it a shelter) for his loved ones. He is trying to raise funds for his NGO, Concern for Animal and Environment.
Dogs are left free to roam around and take rest in any part of Sandip Karan’s house.
~ Kaushik Sengupta, self-taught social documentary photographer
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