By Ujwala Chintala | Founder & President
Namaste, dear friend of SAFI,
We have news worth celebrating with you: our clinic in Hyderabad is now consistently sterilizing 50 dogs and cats every single month — and it is because of you.
That number may sound modest next to India's 80 million homeless animals. But for those of us who started this work years ago with nothing but a piece of land and a promise, it is enormous. Fifty surgeries a month means 600 fewer litters a year. It means 600 mother dogs who will never give birth in a drain, on a roadside, or in fear.
What it took to get here
A consistent 50-a-month sterilization rhythm did not happen overnight. With your support over the years, SAFI has:
Built the clinic, kennels, and recovery wards inside our shelter
Equipped surgery rooms with anesthesia machines, autoclaves, and surgical instruments
Hired and retained two veterinarians and two veterinary technicians, trained in mass-sterilization protocols at World Veterinary Service
Stocked quality medicines, anesthesia, and suture material
Brought on a coordinator, ambulance driver, cooks, and cleaning staff who keep the clinic running seven days a week
Purchased an ambulance for pickups and post-surgery releases
Built a tracking system so every dog is returned to the exact street it came from — the heart of the Animal Birth Control method
Each of those line items was funded, in part, by donors like you. None of it was glamorous. All of it was necessary.
Why this matters right now
Earlier this year, viral news broke of villages in Telangana where hundreds of stray dogs were poisoned in coordinated mass killings — a tragedy that drew national and international attention (BBC News, NDTV). SAFI's team visited every affected village, documented the graves, and worked with police on exhumations and postmortems. We have filed 14 First Information Reports and 4 High Court cases to push for enforcement of India's Animal Birth Control Rules, which require sterilization and vaccination — not killing — as the lawful response to community dogs.
The lesson from Telangana is painful but clear: where humane sterilization programs do not exist, cruelty fills the vacuum. Every dog we sterilize and return is one fewer dog at risk, and one less excuse for those who would rather poison than spay.
Where we still need help
We are honest with our donors, so here is what is still hard:
One ambulance is a bottleneck. It serves spay/neuter pickups, drop-offs, rescues, vet visits, and supply runs. We urgently need a second.
We have no trained dog catchers. Catching feral, unsocialized dogs safely is a specialized skill, and without a dedicated catching team, we cannot reach the dogs who need us most.
Our goal is 200 sterilizations a month, not 50. To get there we need to roughly double our team, kennels, medicines, and transport capacity.
What it will take to reach 200 sterilizations a month
We have done the math, line by line. Quadrupling our output is not a matter of working harder — it is a matter of building a second, parallel sterilization unit alongside the one your gifts already built. Here is exactly what that looks like.
One-time setup
Recurring monthly operating costs — $3,800 / month ($45,600 / year)
First-year all-in: $71,400 to take SAFI from 50 to 200 humane sterilizations every month — 2,400 surgeries a year, on a street-by-street ABC model that returns every animal to its exact home territory.
This list is long. It is long because humane, lawful, mass sterilization is one of the toughest animal welfare programs in the world to run well. We are determined to do it the right way — no shortcuts, no cruelty, no exceptions.
A gift, in concrete terms
$50 sterilizes one dog or cat — surgery, anesthesia, suture, recovery
$250 funds five sterilizations, or one month of a dog catcher's salary
$500 funds one month of medicines for the entire clinic
$3,800 funds one full month of the expanded 200-surgery program
$20,000 puts a second ambulance on the road permanently
If you can give again this quarter, please do. If you cannot, please share this project with one person who loves animals.
Thank you for standing with India's strays — and with the small team in Hyderabad working every day to give them a humane future.
With gratitude,
Ujwala Chintala
Founder & President, Stray Animal Foundation India (SAFI)
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