“We need first more awareness campaigns to make owners understand about the need for spay/neuter surgery.” 

This is a very common reply I get when talking about the need to make spay/neuter surgery more accessible for dog owners.

But do we really first need more awareness campaigns? How much more awareness is needed? What happens when everyone in a target area is fully aware of the benefits of spay/neuter? Does the number of operated dogs automatically increase?

What is the distance from awareness to availability that we need to also cross?

What if, instead of only running awareness campaigns, we would focus on making services actually and concretely available and affordable and then letting the pet owners do the awareness rising by speaking to their friends and family and neighbours about the good experience they had. I mean, did you attend awareness sessions about the use of Whatsapp or mobile pay apps before starting to use them? Or did you just see your friends using them and understood the benefits and as these services were easily available for you, you just begun to use them?

Twenty years ago in the Nilgiris, hardly any cat owner ever enquired about cat virus vaccines. There were no private clinics and the government dispensaries and hospitals or the animal charity veterinary services did not maintain stock of multi-component cat virus vaccines simply because no one ever asked about those and the trend and assumption was that most cat owners would not be ready to pay for the cost of a vaccine for their cats.

Fast forward couple of decades and the most common case that comes to my small private clinic, Otter Animal Clinic, is a cat for multicomponent vaccine.

Is this change in interest and demand for cat vaccination a result from some specific awareness campaign? Has there been a rally with school children marching across the towns with posters and shouting slogans about importance of cat vaccination?

No.

There has been nothing that could be named as an awareness campaign. No school program, no flyers distributed, no loudspeakers. Nothing.

But how come, then, the change? Why are there now so many cat owners actively coming forward to ask for cat vaccination appointments?

What has gradually changed over these years is the access and availability of the cat vaccine as well as the number of veterinary service providers that treat cats. There are more private practitioners as well as the expanded WVS India charity clinic service who maintain cat vaccine stock and therefore it has become easier for cat owners to access the vaccination. This has led more and more cat owners to understand that cats need to be vaccinated and that it helps to protect them from serious, sudden diseases, that in the past might have just been assumed by the owners as ‘died due to poisoning’ -cases.

I believe that the key to expand spay/neuter programs in India is to allow and facilitate the development of different models that focus on getting owned dogs sterilised. Based on various studies conducted in India, 24-80% of owned dogs are allowed to roam free and of these 53-95% are not sterilised. This population of dogs keeps producing unwanted puppies that are then abandoned on the roadsides.

What these owners need is not simply more awareness of the problem they are facing all the time right in front of them – but better access to a solution, better access to affordable spay/neuter within a traveling distance that is practically possible for them! When every happy dog owner who has got their pet sterilised talks about the benefits to their neighbors and refers them to the same vet service provider that they went – that is the best possible awareness rising we can hope for!