Selfless gesture: 'We feed' initiative by animal activist takes responsibility to feed animals, birds amid lockdown

Mangaluru: The word ‘lockdown’ often fuels thoughts of boredom and most importantly social disconnection has caused inconvenience to many of us. It has hardly been a cause of death, rather, in the current circumstances, it is a measure to avert that. However, we cannot seem to say the same for stray animals who have been pushed to the verge of starvation owing to the nationwide shutdown.

In order to stop the stray animals from becoming unforeseen casualties of coronavirus, animal activist Tauseef Ahmed has started a new crowdsourced initiative called “We feed”,  where stray animals are fed.

Speaking to Udayavani, Tauseef said, “Birds and animals are the worst affected due to lockdown because we humans know what is happening and therefore have stored food. It’s not the same for animals, they do not have the capacity to store food for themselves. Hence I came up with the initiative called ‘We feed’.”

“Basically through ‘We feed’ initiative, anyone who is willing to feed the stray can donate food packages like pedigree, cattle feeds, rice bags, milk etc…The collected food items will be handed over to the community feeders of different areas like Bokkapatna, Surathkal, Talapady, and many more. They will then feed those food items to the strays in their area,” Tauseef added.

“It’s been a month since we started this initiative and about 52 community feeders have joined the initiative. The main reason I started this initiative was that as an individual I can only feed 50 to 60 animals a day, but we if we all join hands together we can feed many more numbers of animals,” said the animal activist.

He further added, “The collected food bags have been distributed to all the community feeders who have joined hands with us and we as a team are feeding over 3000 strays.”

Under We feed initiative Tauseef has so far spent nearly Rs 1.5 lakh out of which Rs 80,000 was raised through funds and the remaining money was spent from his savings. “I have been very lucky because people themselves came forward made a contribution and I never asked anyone to make a donation. To my surprise, many college students too made some contribution and I’m very thankful to each and every one of them. My family and friends too have made contributions,” said Tauseef.

“I was overwhelmed by the response this initiative received because initially when I started it I thought this would go up only fro 3 or 4 days but we have successfully completed 30 days and the chain has kept growing day by day,” he added.

Tausheef further said that they have been following all the lockdown norms and also practicing social distancing. “Our volunteers have personally gone to the house of the contributors to collect the food items and never asked anyone to come out as it would be lockdown violation because they do not have passes,” informed Tauseef.

“The main objective of this initiative is to ensure no animals or bird stays hungry. I’m very thankful to our city Police Commissioner Harsha who has helped and supported us to carry forward this initiative,” Tauseef expressed.