A Furry Twist on a Traditional Practice
To indulge in the practice of yoga with puppies seems almost too good to be true, but it has come to life thanks to the vision of three college friends who set out to make a difference for the four-legged community.
5 days ago
Subhashree Madhavan, Swathi Renugopal and Sinduja Krishnakumar, business graduates from Ethiraj college, never dreamt of launching an enterprise like Pawga, where they could unite their love for puppies and reverence of yoga. It all started, Subhashree says, with the three friends volunteering with Blue Cross of India where they gained first-hand witness to the difficulties and challenges involved in sheltering abandoned, stray animals. “Swathi used to volunteer with Blue Cross of India and she introduced us to this,” Subhashree said. She continued, “We realised that all shelters lack certain amenities and are faced with obstacles of various kinds. In Chennai, there is a lack of basic knowledge of animal welfare among the general public.”
Photo Credits: Sriya Dutta
With the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequently a global pandemic, animal shelters were neglected and the state of animal welfare was at an all-time low. While ruminating about the time, Subhashree said, “Volunteers were unable to travel and labourers lacked resources.” At this time, she along with Swathi and Sinduja all found themselves in Chennai for the first time in years. While pondering over the deteriorating conditions of animals in 2020, they conceptualised Pawga. Speaking about why they chose yoga, Subhashree lamented how yoga helped not just her, but a lot of people who were mentally struggling to cope during the pandemic, and also touched upon how puppy yoga has become famous in Western Europe, where they practise with breeds popular in the land “Sophie Turner popularised performing yoga with animals of your choice when she performed goat-yoga,” Subhashree added.
The whole concept behind Pawga is conducting workshops that are beginner-friendly, with puppies that are one to three months old in age. It is no secret that India has an ever-growing number of abandoned dogs – Subhashree noted that Blue Cross of India shelters close to 200 to 300 puppies. All the puppies at the
Pawga workshops come from Blue Cross, and a portion of the ticket sales goes towards the animal welfare NGO. “I would say Pawga is about human welfare and animal welfare because contact and bonding take place for both parties,” Sunbhashree said. All sessions are partly for experiential adoption, so participants can come, and spend time with the puppies and if they decide to adopt them, the formal process of adoption will commence. In Chennai, the organization is associated with Blue Cross, In Bangalore, the association is with Charlie’s Animal rescue and in Kerala, it is People for Animals in Trivandrum and so on.
There might be some scepticism about how puppies and participants bond over an hour-long session, to which Subhashree replied that yoga accelerates the bonding and that participants are welcome to arrive thirty minutes prior to the session, and can stay for 30 minutes after the session ends. She also spoke about Pawga’s children-only session and the opportunity it provides to reach out to the younger generation and educate them about the imperativeness of animal wellbeing, in an attempt to ensure a better future for humans and animals.
The Pawga team enlists certified yoga instructors to conduct their workshops. Their first session, for experimental purposes, was free as they wanted to test how the puppies would react to the people in their proximity. Since then, they have been holding pop-ups at places such as The Bark and AntiSpot in Chennai. Sometimes, certain yoga instructors open up their studios for the sessions. When asked about Pawga’s future plans, Subhashree said, “Currently we are expanding, that’s what 2023 is about; we are launching in Coimbatore, Kolkata and Pune this month. We are also in talks with shelters from all the cities to understand the various challenges each of them faces, and how we, through marketing, can highlight these issues to the general public,” before signing off.
