City embraces a new ‘Pet’ project

Thirty-two-year-old Mumbai-based bar owner Nishant Joshi is facing a curious problem. His pal Leo has turned 18 but is yet to find a suitable partner. So like any good friend who wants to play ‘wingman’, he takes Leo to his bar every other day in the hope that he’ll find true love. The only difference is Leo walks on four legs, has a healthy brown coat and is an 18-month-old English mastiff. And if you thought finding love was hard for humans, “Try being an English Mastiff,” Nishant quips.

Nishant’s ZooBar is one of the few places in town that welcome pets. As a pet owner himself (with over 40 dogs and 100 birds in his family), he knows all too well the problems of pet owners, which is why he opened the ZooBar — a space that’s intended for pets and their human parents. However, Nishant is not alone. With a number of services, initiatives and communities, ranging from an online community which arranges matchmaking for pets to a portal that lets you buy the best toys for your four-legged friends a number of empathising pet owners and pet lovers are going the extra mile to make the city a better place for our friends from the animal kingdom.

About a year-and-a-half ago, when Yash Sanghavi decided to take his golden retriever along on a holiday, he realised the dearth of pet-friendly hotels in the country. “It came from a personal problem and e-commerce was also booming at that time and finally by 2015 we started working on something that will solve this problem,” says Yash, who now runs Mypetshop.in, which provides a range of essential pet products that pet-parents find hard to get their hands on, especially while travelling, ranging from food and grooming needs to even interactive toys.

The aim, says Yash, is not providing just products, but making life easier for both pets and their owners. Telling us more about his portal, he says, “We have a team of professional pet experts, who can guide our customers. We are soon planning to launch a live chat with the experts for those who want to research a little more before buying for their pets.”

While finding products and necessities for pets is one thing, finding expert help is even harder, says Trisha Guha of Bandra-based bar, Doolally, which is helping pet parents in this regard. Another one of the few spaces that welcome pets, Doolally, Trisha says, is helping pet-owners in ways, which even she had not imagined when it was opened a year ago. “Ours is not just a place that welcomes pets but strives to take care of pet needs as well. We realised that since there are very few spaces for owners to take their pets, there was not enough community building. That’s where Doolally comes in. Every week we bring in pet-behaviourists and pet experts who help pet-owners that come in with expert help for their problems. But that’s not all as many of our customers now use the space we have provided in ways even we had not conceived. There are pet meet-ups every other day and there are so many impromptu sessions organised by the customers themselves, where they discuss everything pet related.”

One of the leaders in pet-care is Rana Athiya’s Dogspot.in. A website that is famous among pet-owners as a one-stop shop for almost everything pet related, Rana tells us more about Dogspot.in: “I come from a very small university township, Pantnagar near Nainital. I have been a dog lover myself since childhood, and I never used to get good quality products for my pooch. And I knew there was a need for people to get information for their products. That’s how we came up with DogSpot.in.”

Telling us some of the specific challenges that his portal is helping pet owners with, Rana says, “People need to understand that pets are not for Christmas, and they stay for their lifetime and they become a part of your family. So one needs to be very conscious about what one is getting into and what kind of an effort it’s going to take. For example, huskies and Saint Bernards definitely need colder places to live and sometimes even air-conditioned rooms are not enough. However, I have seen some people providing comfortable lives for their dog; there’s one family in Gurgaon I know personally who take the utmost care of their Saint Bernard — they keep him in an air conditioned room, take him swimming, etc. So it depends a lot on the owner, and people need to choose more wisely.”

Giving back to the pet community comes with its own sense of satisfaction, but these initiatives are helping their founders in ways they had not even imagined.

“The pets are in fact attracting more and more people to my bar,” says Nishant, whose ZooBar is leading a movement of sorts among restaurants and bars to make them pet friendly. “Coming with their pets is a great experience for the owners as well, as even they get to socialise among themselves. Only recently one of our regulars met another pet owner at our bar and now they are in a relationship! The idea is to get pets out of any sort of restrictions, but this is also helping out in other ways than we imagined.”

But while there are only a few who are taking up the mantle of providing a better world for pets, good times are surely ahead for our furry friends, believes Rana. “There are about four million pets in India, out of which there will be at least 10 million pet lovers in India. And this community is going to grow and people are going to understand more and more about animal welfare which will consequentially bring in more services,” he concludes.

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