"It was September 17. I was on my way to Dadar with my friend Poorva Tipnis to attend a course by canine behaviourist Shirin Merchant. Just before a tunnel towards Chembur, we saw a person in a grey car throwing something white on the road. My first thought was someone threw garbage in a white bag. But soon, we heard a yelp and saw that it was a Pomeranian," she said.
What would you think if you saw someone throwing a small something from the window of a moving car? Garbage? That's what Kharghar-based surgeon Dr Srilakshmi Amirtheswaran thought. In a matter of seconds she realised it was a dog.
Last week, Amirtheswaran, who is also a canine behaviourist, was travelling in a taxi with a friend on the Eastern Freeway when she saw a Pomeranian being thrown out of the window of a passing car. She not only managed to save the animal's life, but is also taking care of her.
"It was September 17. I was on my way to Dadar with my friend Poorva Tipnis to attend a course by canine behaviourist Shirin Merchant. Just before a tunnel towards Chembur, we saw a person in a grey car throwing something white on the road. My first thought was someone threw garbage in a white bag. But soon, we heard a yelp and saw that it was a Pomeranian," she said.
She added that she immediately asked the cab driver to stop and got out of the vehicle to rescue the animal. But before she could reach the her, the bitch was run over by an oncoming vehicle and flung to the other side. They thought she was dead, but she had survived.
"Without caring for herself, she ran on the freeway and managed to reach the animal; she was bleeding and in a lot of pain. We tried calling up vets but, due to Ganeshotsav, most were off-duty. So, we took her to the BSPCA hospital in Parel," said Tipnis, a Pune resident. "I can't believe someone can be so ruthless as to throw an animal out of a speeding vehicle."
Amirtheswaran said that because of her years of caring for animals and rescuing dogs, she knew that they are abandoned in such gruesome manner, but, she added, this was the first time she actually saw it. She even said that after the incident she looked for cameras around on that stretch of the freeway, but there were none. Had there been CCTVs around, she said, she would have asked the police to look for the vehicle and, using the registration number, gone after the culprit.
"The bitch, around eight years old, was discharged on Sunday, but she is still in trauma and will need proper rehabilitation. At the moment, she is with me. I realised that she must have been kept in a very unhygienic and small place as I saw that the skin on her thighs was missing the normal fur and had become hard. There is also the chance that she must have given birth to puppies and, having grown old, abandoned. I hope she gets adopted once she's healthy," Amirtheswaran said, adding that initially the bitch also drank her own urine, which showed that she was used to not having access to clean water.
Amirtheswaran said incidents of animals being abandoned were becoming extremely common as people bought dogs not because they loved them but to make a fashion statement. However, they soon realised that they (pedigree dogs) are high maintenance, abandoning them if the animals became old or developed health issues, she added.
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