Snippets: Where It Really Started

Long before there was an association, a feeding round or a sterilisation day with a vet, there was Snippets: a loose WhatsApp group of neighbours in Blue Bay who cared about the stray dogs around them and wanted to do something.

It began around the turn of 2016. Living close to the beach, you couldn't miss the dogs: big ones, small ones, young ones, and the commotion every time a female came on heat, chased and harassed by every male on the beach. A few neighbours decided they couldn't just keep watching, and someone set up a group.

There was no plan and no structure. The neighbours chipped in Rs 100 here, Rs 100 there, because nobody else was doing anything for these dogs, and sterilisation was the one thing that could really change things.

The money paid for sterilisations at PAWS. A truck was bought, the same one we still use today, and whenever someone had time they would reverse down to the beach, see which dogs were friendly enough to pick up, and drive them to PAWS. Everyone in the group became an extra pair of eyes: spot a dog that still needed sterilising, take a photo, share it, and someone would go and find it.

One morning they picked up two puppies, a brother and sister of six or seven months, just old enough to be sterilised, and both were done that same day. The sister was Princess. Ten years later she is still here, still a Blue Bay dog. That's her in the first photo, the brown dog on the left, on the beach in 2020 with Jingo and Pepe, who later flew to a new life in Germany.

Snippets carried on through Covid, when the neighbours begged for food, leftovers and bags of pellets for dogs that suddenly had nothing (that story is here). Other residents were quietly helping in their own ways too, and over time all those separate efforts came together. In June 2024 they became South Sterilisation & Welfare Campaign.

Everything we do today grew out of that one group of neighbours who cared.