GoaPets Is Giving Us Another Reason To Love Animals

As human beings, we always search for that one loyal companion. The unconditional love we receive from a pet is incomparable and can does much more than just keep you company. Nothing compares to the joy of coming home to a loyal companion. Pets also are known to decrease stress, improve heart health, and even help children with their emotional and social skills. 

Though we have a soft spot for such companions, we often fail to acknowledge the harsh conditions strays undergo. According to India’s Livestock Census-2012, there are about 17.13 million stray dogs and 5.28 million cattle in India. However, the number currently could be higher. According to another estimate as of 2018, the population of stray dogs in India is around 30-35 million. To help tackle this problem we have seen the birth of many pet shelters in India. Pet lovers have also taken to social media to start accounts sharing pictures of pets to encourage adoption. In a more resourceful way, their offline settings include organising adoption camps and pet shows by collaborating with brands supporting animal care.  

GoaPets have been contributing immensely to this initiative in Goa. They have created a  platform for people to showcase their pets and also be the mediator and create awareness about adoption. The founder, Vallabh Salgaonkar started by posting pictures of his friend’s pets to fill up space. GoaPets now has over 7K followers organically on social media.

At Goan Insider we spoke to Vallabh Salgaonkar to know a little bit more about GoaPets and their future plans. The excerpts of our conversation are below.

Tell us a little about yourself

I am Vallabh Salgaonkar, born and brought up in Goa. I am a pet lover by nature and a marketer and engineer by qualifications. I have an interest in photography and graphic designing. I even draw sometimes.

I completed my MBA from the Goa Institute of Management in 2020. That’s where the roots for trying new things lie. GoaPets is a baby project that I have taken up to showcase the pets while trying new things and following the passion of social media marketing.

How did the idea for GoaPets come about? When did your love for animals begin?

We started GoaPets mostly because of the love we have for animals, and because there were no pages present to showcase all the pets that were present in Goa. Since then we’ve grown so much with around 7k followers on Instagram. The growth could’ve been more, but we always made it a point to make sure all our followers are organic, even though it slowed the number of followers. This helped us connect personally to our audience and create a great community.

My love for pets started from a very young age. We had chickens and dogs at my mom’s house. There were also many cats at my house which were always part of the family. We also had a labrador with us. Then there was a patch where we didn’t have any pets, but there was this one cat that used to come to the back of my house to eat food. We used to feed it, and it slowly started moving in and slowly made place in our house first and then our hearts. Since then we have had at least one cat with us, with many newborns who left the house after growing up, but they still visit sometimes.

What are the different activities that you conduct? Have you collaborated with any brands? 

We started off with publishing pictures of pets on our page, since then we’ve taken up many activities like helping people to adopt pets, pet care awareness, product reviews and promotions, training tips, giveaways and much more.

We’ve collaborated with many brands like Mascot pet shop, BarkButler for giveaways. We also did a small promotion for Sony Entertainment India to promote their movie Alpha, which was pet related and was mostly promoted on social media.

After helping promote Pet Social, now we look forward to hosting such events in future, and also organizing drives to donate reflective belts for the stray dogs and cows in order to reduce the rate of accidents and also medical camps for strays that need assistance.

Could you tell us about ‘Pet Socials’ that you were part of?

Pet Social wasn’t entirely organized by us. We helped Mascot Pet Shop in publicizing the event because of our reach in Goa. We had a couple of giveaways and many pet owners took part in it. A couple of them won passes to attend the event.

It was a full-day event with fun games and competitions for pets. There was a swimming pool which was a major attraction. This event focused on meeting and greeting sessions for pet owners as well as pets to enjoy a day off.

What is ‘band donation camp’ and what inspired you to come up with this idea?

Band Donation Camp is basically a drive that we’re planning to organize where we put reflective bands on stray dogs and cows. We’ve seen many cattles and dogs meeting with accidents at night, especially on highways. These reflective belts glow with the headlight and will help avoid any such incidences.

One main reason why we thought of this initiative is we counted 278 dogs from Mapusa to Sanqulim on a particular night, and that’s just near the main road. They were either sleeping on or beside the roads, making it really dangerous for them at night. 

We’re trying to make this a public funded initiative, not just monetarily, but also getting their help in putting the belts along with NGOs so that people are more involved in all the activities. We’re in contact with a few brands who make these bands. As much as we want to buy many bands at lower cost, we also want to make sure they last longer and don’t cause irritation to the animals.

On GoaPet’s social media handles, you share a lot of images of pets. How do you acquire these images? How has the response been from people in Goa? 

I started with posting pictures of my friend’s pets to fill up space, mostly the people who I knew wouldn’t object. I wanted to keep the growth very organic, and therefore didn’t give out my name so that there’s no negatives or positives associated with the page. The page took off quite well and people then started tagging and sharing pictures after a couple of weeks itself.

Now we get submissions on the page private messages, tagged in the posts, or submission through our website. The response has always been great with more than 10-15 pictures coming each day, and we try to fit in as many as we can.

How important is social media for the growth of GoaPets?

Social media has been a very integral part of our growth. We started off on instagram and it’s the community that we have that keep us going with all their support. The people have given us ideas, told us where we went wrong and helped in any way possible till now. We generate most of our content from social media too. It’s the biggest source of inspiration for ideas and the motivation to go forward with the page.

What was your mission at the outset? Have you achieved it yet?

The mission was to create a platform for people to showcase their pets and also be the mediator and create awareness about adoption. There are many people who just go and buy pets but then can’t take care of them. We also tried to convince them to adopt an Indie pup or try not to adopt from force breeders.

We have tried our best to convince a lot of people, but it’s still very less. The goals set are very big and it’ll take us some time to get there, but right now we’re enjoying the journey.

What gets you excited about your work? 

Social media has become an integral part of our lives now. Learning digital marketing and trying different things on the page always excited me.

For me it’s the people who I interact with using the page as a medium has also played an important role in keeping this work exciting. Seeing new pets everyday, hearing their stories, getting updates on pets who get adopted through our page at the end of the day really makes it all the efforts that go in.

Where is GoaPets based out of? Why do you think that is the best place for you?

I am based out of Ribandar, Panjim but the working of GoaPets has always been online. We just serve as a bridge between people when it comes to adoption or any rescues and mostly work with NGOs for this reason.

Not having a physical presence has it’s cons, but I think that has pushed us to use the social presence and involvement of people to the highest potential. We don’t have to limit our work just because it’s out of our reach. People have always volunteered and came forward to work whenever we’ve put a word out.

What’s next for you and GoaPets? 

As an organization we want to grow out of Goa and explore the possibilities across the country. But GoaPets has always been a baby project, and the community we’ve earned here has a different kind of bond.

We are planning to start a page for Mumbai and then grow it organically for the whole of India. This project is still under planning and will go ahead as soon as we can.

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