The Animal Care Trust located in Rajapalayam in Tamil Nadu’s Virudhunagar district is doing yeomen service for the animals in and around its area. Established in 2014 its veterinary hospital takes care of the wounded and lost wild animals and ensures that they are well treated and cared for before releasing them in the wild.

It was started by S.D. Selvaram Raja, who was deeply involved with issues concerning environment and used to conduct awareness programmes in schools and colleges on these subjects. While doing this, he realised that a large number of wild animals were dying in his area as there was no medical facility to treat them.

Raja discussed this with his friends and together they decided to start the Animal Care Trust. Among others who are part of the core team are Vishnu D. Raja, Srirenganatha Raja, and P. Ramachandran who is a veterinarian.

Coming together, they all started a veterinary hospital.

Today, the trust working in close association with the State Forest Department officials has been conducting rescue operations in the Rajapalayam, Sattur, Vathirairuppu and Srivilliputhur forest ranges and have so far rehabilitated 1,300 wild animals, including mammals like civet cats, jungle cat, sambar, spotted deer and bonnet macaque, reptiles like hundreds of deadly snakes, Indian star and Indian softshell turtles and several species of birds. Stray animals are also rescued by the Trust.

Talking about their work, M. Karthick, Forest Range Officer told the media that the organisation takes very good care of animals. In fact, they have been handling a large number of snake rescue operations in the area.

Among some of the interesting animal infants they have rescued are an infant jungle cat and painted storks. The former they took care of for three months and after training it to hunt, released it in the wild. For the 10 storks, the team had to make a lot of effort to procure fish which were not available in their area.