You call yourself a “single dad.” How did you get this identity?
I realized this through the small details of daily life. I live like a bachelor in my house along with Winter. Every day, when I leave for work, I take Winter with me and leave him in a special place, where he stays for the day. That’s one of my start-up offices. I carry a package for the winter with a tiffin box and a ball with which he likes to play.
At some point, I noticed that this whole routine was exactly like the way my dad himself used to drop me to school before going to office. I used to have my backpack and he would check if I had everything. It was a moment of excitement when he would come to pick me up in the evening. Likewise, Winter is excited to see me again when I go to pick her up. During monsoon, I have to put a raincoat on him, bring him back carefully, wash his paws and then dry him.
These responsibilities and the continuity they brought to my life made me feel as if I was in my father’s place. Because I am not married yet, I consider myself a single father.
You write about a time when you wondered whether you were even capable of caring for another life. When did that change happen and how did it happen?
Winter has been a part of my life for the last nine years. I adopted him when I was studying at Cornell University and lived in Ithaca in the United States. I think the milestone where I definitely felt ready was a little late. This happened two years after Winter was adopted.
Bringing Winter from Ithaca to Mumbai was a very harrowing journey in terms of the paperwork, the risks involved and all the rules and precautions required to ensure their safety and health. He traveled with me on a 16-hour flight. This required about three months of preparation and consultations with the Animal Husbandry Department in India and the Health Department in the US. During that time, I was forced to grow up so much and so quickly for winter!
When we landed in Mumbai, and came out of the plane, I had this sudden realization, I said to myself, “If I can do this, now I can do anything to protect her, and raise her the way she should be raised.” I became a father to Winter when I was 24. I am currently 33 years old.
In India, we often find fathers who find responsibilities like toilet training and diaper changing to be useless, so they don’t want to get involved in them. Why don’t people feel this discomfort and disgust when it comes to cleaning up after pets?
I might be the wrong person to ask this question because I can’t wait to be a father to a human child. I’m looking forward to that and embracing what I see as a gender neutral role. What I’m sharing with you is not coming from a place of demonstrative progressiveness or wokeness. I think my parenting journey with Winter has really helped lay the foundation for what parenting a child will be like for me. I am very grateful to him.
That said, I have to admit that a pet is much more independent than a human child in some aspects. You take your pet for a walk, and he does his business outside. It is quite simple. Secondly, no pet cries all the time. That is a big difference. Furthermore, you are not so concerned about your pet’s cognitive development and its values and principles.
If you are a pet parent you don’t have to pay school fees. Does that even matter?
Yes! This could be another reason why people like animal babies more than human babies. When you are raising a child, you have to groom and mold him every step of the way to ensure that he has a solid value system. Dog has a nice set of default position values. I think people also love pets because it frees them from many of the emotional responsibilities that come with having children.
While reading your book it feels like Winter has turned you upside down. For example, you write about how you had forgotten that Ithaca was so beautiful and Winter reminded you of it. What do you think about my explanation?
We decide our roles in a particular way. But are they really like that? Absolutely. No. Your question is very interesting because we look at things from a human perspective, and forget that dog years and human years are not the same. It is difficult to say at what age they stop playing the role of son or daughter. It is now nine o’clock in the winter. In human years, he is over 60.
If you look at our relationship from this perspective, he is much older in terms of his lifespan and experience. It is true that he has raised me in many ways, not by intention but by his behavior. He has made me realize my shortcomings. They have made me aware that I need to be more present, more forgiving, and more open in relation to those with whom I share love and goodwill.
When I look at Winter, I see that he is completely immersed in that moment. He is not worried about past and future. He just cares about what’s in front of him. In fact this is the key to happiness. You can’t expect a human child to give you this kind of knowledge. I learn from him all the time.
There have been news reports about people who adopted animals when going through a mental health crisis and gave up their pets when they felt better. This happened a lot during the COVID-19 pandemic. What would you say to them?
People experience a lot of things including excitement, happiness and companionship without much investment because a dog just keeps giving. Some people take these pets lightly because they have no impact in terms of being held accountable by society or the law. I would say to these people: “Don’t ruin someone else’s life! The dog will not ask you questions. Therefore, the only thing that is left is your conscience. You should treat the dog like a family member or blood relative, not like a trophy. If you are tempted to experience the company of a dog when you are alone, there is a beautiful solution in the form of street dogs. You should definitely make friends with them and visit them often.”
Unfortunately, the entire ecosystem of pet adoption and pet breeding is structured in such a way that there is hardly any regulatory scrutiny. Whenever I rescue puppies or kittens, and put them up for adoption, I have a questionnaire for people to fill out before they even enter my home. Some of them get angry because they think they are doing some charitable work and favor.
I ask them things like: How many members are there in your family? Are they all excited to adopt a pet, or is it just you? How many hours do you spend outside the house? What kind of house is this? Are you local? Are you planning to move to another city? Will the pet come with you? If not, who will care for the pet after you are gone? Who will stay with the pet when you travel for work? Have you had any pets before? If they say yes, I ask what happened to the pet? A pet’s life is precious, so it’s important to know who is adopting it.
I tell people that if the adoption doesn’t go smoothly, they should bring the pets back to me and not dump them anywhere. It’s sad when pets come back but at least they’re safe with me.
What do you think about the Supreme Court’s directions regarding removal of community dogs from public places? What kind of sensitivity is required for the judiciary so that the courts can take into account animal welfare and animal rights?
At the core of our judicial system is a solid ethical framework, which is progressive in terms of how it thinks not only about humans, but also about animals. Article 51A of the Indian Constitution talks about the duty of every citizen to have compassion towards living beings and to come forward in support of other life. When we refuse to do so, we abdicate our fundamental civic duty.
I hope the judiciary will push for better implementation of the animal birth control rules that are already in place. Basically, you collect animals from the area, sterilize them so they don’t breed, and then release them back into the same area so their numbers don’t increase to a level where dog overpopulation, dog aggression, and dog bites become a serious concern. It is a beautifully designed system. It just needs to be implemented at all levels.
There is a large population in India, including street vendors and homeless people, who feed and care for community dogs. But they don’t necessarily have the resources to provide veterinary care. What kind of policy changes would make this possible?
We need a law that says if someone brings a stray animal to a hospital or clinic for emergency care, whether private or public, the animal should be given free treatment. Otherwise, medical care should be subsidized to the extent that the people you talked about can afford it. It is not just the judiciary that we need to be concerned about. There are superstitions, myths and fears about street dogs in a section of the society, which need to be addressed. Instead of fighting it out in court, we can try to understand each other as rational human beings.
Chintan Girish Modi is a journalist, teacher, poet, fiction writer and literary critic. Her work has appeared in anthologies such as 101 Indian Children’s Books We Love (2013), Borderlines: Volume 1 (2015), Clear Hold Build (2019), Fearless Love (2019), and Bent Book (2020).
