The inspirational and moving story of Vizag’s dog rescuer Hima Jyoti

How many stray dogs can one feed in a day? Even in one’s wildest imagination, may be around 100 to 200 dogs. But there’s an amazing lady in our city who would startle you with her numbers. Each day, Hima Jyoti manages to feed as many as a thousand stray dogs across Visakhapatnam. Apart from this, she also manages to take care of 95 dogs in her dog shelter at her farmhouse. Now, these are some numbers!

Hima and her dog shelter

Right since her childhood, she has an inherent empathy and love towards the voiceless. As years grew by, her intention to serve them grew stronger and stronger. Hima’s journey on this noble path started 5 years ago when she fed three stray dogs. This gave her massive happiness and hasn’t looked back ever since. Today, along with her friend, Pramod, she takes care of the sick or injured dogs. She picks up dogs that are distressed and takes them to her farm for treatment. Sometimes, if the situation demands, Hima also does on-spot treatment. Hima treats these animals as her own kids and has provided them with multiple facilities at her three acred farmhouse. She feeds the dogs with rice, chicken, milk, etc and has also hired an in-house doctor to attend their medical needs.

Hima worked in a high paying job until tragedy struck. Unfortunately, Hima was diagnosed with blood cancer and had to resign her job to undergo treatment. The treatment has been costing her a lot of money. Apart from these medical expenses, she needs to bear the financial burden of taking care of the dogs too which costs around 3.65 lakhs a month.

Until now, Hima has spent each and every penny from her own pocket. But now that she has resigned her job, she’s finding it difficult to manage her medical as well as the dog-care expenses simultaneously. With the encouragement of her friends and well-wishers, Hima has started reaching out for funds to help her and her kids. She will rejoin her job in another three months and until then, will need the support of all of us in getting through this tough phase.

They say “A dog is a man’s best friend”. Well, if that’s the case, Hima is the luckiest person on earth to have made more than thousand best friends. Also, interestingly, most of the dogs in our city share one commonality- all of them have Hima Jyoti as their best friend.