Maneka Sanjay Gandhi

My mother, who is remembered by friends and family alike as the world’s most buoyant and caring person, spent the last few months of her life ill in bed with cancer. But no matter how sick she was, the first thing she did every morning was to spread bajra on her balcony for the birds. She said the happiest part of her day was to lie back in bed and watch the daily drama. First would come the fat feisty pigeons who would jostle each other off the ledge and spend more time fighting than feeding. Then the rose-ringed parakeets (some of whom from a batch that had been rescued and released nearby) who ate quickly and quietly. And then came the timid little sparrows pecking at the seeds furtively and vanishing as magically as they appeared.

Maneka Sanjay Gandhi

Compassion is not a hobby, or something you do in a good mood, or when you are well fed, or with your friends. It is a mental state, or an orientation towards suffering that includes four things -

Recognizing that there is suffering.

Maneka Sanjay Gandhi

Help!! I’m being cheated. The meat industry, the pesticide polluters, the hunters and the factories have combined to make so many wondrous creatures die out – even before I could feast my eyes on them.

Maneka Sanjay Gandhi

In the last two months three people, two working in a newspaper and one in a magazine, have savagely attacked the lakhs of animal feeders who have risked their own health to keep animals alive, and claimed that their feeding has alienated the whole of India. All three have stopped short of asking for them to be killed because they know that, while their ranting is harmless, any suggestion of violence will alienate most of the country. All three have this in common: they keep foreign pedigreed dogs.

Maneka Sanjay Gandhi

I have known Merritt Clifton for many years now. He, his wife Beth, and son Wolf are completely devoted to animals, and run an emagazine called ANIMALS 24-7 which you should all read.

One of their board members, Vicky Crosetti who died recently, was a nationally recognized expert in the phenomenon of hoarding. She had written an article on how to deal with this and I will quote liberally from her experience, because we have to deal with this on a regular basis and each case breaks my heart.