As they emerged from the Animal Help Foundation's (AHF) hospital in Ahmedabad, Lallubhai Panchal and his wife Kamlaben were beaming. After all, Pinki, their pet cat, was purring with good health following its near brush with death. When Pinki was badly mauled by a stray dog a fortnight ago, the Panchals were in a dilemma till a friend urged them to have the cat admitted to the AHF hospital. The Panchals are glad they did so. Pinki was operated upon and treated for 15 days before the Panchals took it back home, much to the delight of their daughter, Kiran, 18, who had given up hope on the cat's revival. Says Lallubhai: "I could never imagine a hospital where animals are cared for like people. The nurses take the animals' temperature with a thermometer three times a day, just like they would with people."

PET PERCH: Saigal (on chair) and the hospital staff with their patients

The AHF hospital is complete with wards for different diseases and animals, and is perhaps one of the few places where stray and abandoned animals are treated with the same care as pets. The hospital was set up two years ago thanks to the efforts of Ahmedabad's Zaveri family and animal lover Rahul Saigal, who is now the institute's director. Since then, the hospital has treated over 10,000 animals and birds ranging from stray dogs, cows, buffaloes, vultures, cats and monkeys to flamingoes, even kites. The number of avian patients increases considerably during the three-month kite-flying season between December and February when a large number of birds are hurt by kites.

It is easy enough to have an animal admitted to the hospital. Anybody who comes across an injured animal or a bird can leave it in the care of the four veterinary doctors, 20 nurses and scores of other workers in the hospital. Most importantly, the treatment here is completely free. "Our concept is different from that of other institutions indulging in social service. We run a professional hospital for animals where nothing is allowed to go amiss when it comes to their treatment. Our stress is on abandoned animals who have no one to take care of," says Saigal, a hotel management graduate who abandoned a successful career to take up the project, drawn by his love for animals.

When Saigal went to the Zaveri family-Shyama Sarabhai, her husband Anand Zaveri, and son Shan, a real-estate developer-and put forward his dream of treating stray animals professionally, the family was instantly supportive. In the two years that the hospital has been functioning, the family, along with a few friends, has provided Rs 1 crore, or Rs 4 lakh a month, towards the salary of the staff and other expenses.

As the AHF hospital is built on government land, the Zaveris and Saigal have now bought Rs 1 crore worth of land near Ahmedabad, where construction of a new hospital is under way. Touted to be one of the best animal hospitals in the world, it is set to acquire the best of medical equipment as well as modern devices like tranquilliser guns, net guns and blow pipes to capture injured animals. Currently, catching injured animals and treating them is not only tedious but also fraught with risk, with a couple of AHF workers injured every week while ensnaring a dog or a monkey.

Saigal also plans to make the upcoming hospital a self-sufficient organisation by earning revenue from the treatment of privately-owned animals and using it for abandoned and stray animals. Says Tina Gonsalves, a veterinary doctor at the AHF hospital: "The new hospital will be simply out of this world."

Not that the present hospital lacks much: it has wards for trauma management, a quarantine, separate wards for dogs, cats and birds and a room for animal birth control. In fact, impressed by the AHF hospital's work on birth control among stray dogs of Ahmedabad-it has sterilised close to 6,000 stray dogs in the past one year-the city municipal corporation has now assigned the job of dog birth control to the AHF. Under this project, the hospital will sterilise 55,000 dogs in the next three years. Each dog will be caught, tagged, sterilised and dewormed before being treated for infections. It will then be released in the area from where it was caught.

On the best of days, it is not easy to capture and treat or sterilise a dog or other stray animals, but for Saigal and his team, it is not an option. After all, it is a mission of love, a pet preoccupation.