We don’t adopt dogs. Dogs adopt us,” says Bhavna Gakhar, a dog behaviourist, at her Gurugram office. The 33-year-old is the founder of Kukkur Vachan, a pet consultancy service that helps people with dogs learn how to lead a “fulfilled life” with them. There is no official record of the number of people in Delhi and Gurugram who own a dog, but anybody who has cared to take notice of how many people are walking their dogs in the street or public parks at any given time of day can easily conclude that the numbers are only growing. “During the pandemic, a lot of people got dogs just because they were bored of their televisions,” says Gakhar.
But many are at a loss when their dogs do not behave the way they expect it to. Recently an incident of a German Shepherd turning aggressive on the road and attacking a child in Shahdara has come under the spotlight. These ‘sudden’ instances are triggered by a dog’s history or its emotional state at a particular time. There are certain triggers that produce conflict or competition and comfort or ease in a dog. At home too, dog owners, at times, panic when they do not know how to respond to an unexpected growl or the dog shows a reluctance to be petted. Over time, the relationship becomes strained. People blame their dogs for being erratic and misbehaved. Ghakhar is a ‘dog behaviourist’—but according to her, that’s half the job. She has to work on human beings as well.
Started in 2022, Kukkur Vachan is premised on the idea that dogs are family members and not pets. A session of Gakhar’s with a client, which always happens at the client’s place because that is the space the dog is used to, helping them better understand the dog’s needs and anxieties, and working on bettering the man-dog relationship, is, for all practical purposes, a family therapy session. “I’m not doing it for the parents. I’m doing it for the dogs. Because they suffer a lot when there is no understanding of their needs and they have to live inside four walls,” she says. Seeing Gakhar at work, one cannot help but think about Dr Dolittle, the fictional physician who can talk with animals. And once you hear the story of her life, the comparison does not seem far-fetched at all.
Dog confidant, Happy Singh
Gakhar is a single child who grew up in Delhi. As a schoolgirl, she had felt that she could talk to dogs and that they understood what she was saying. Today she dismisses it as “hallucination”, but those early days of making friends with dogs on the streets on her way to school, she agrees, has shaped much of what she does today.
“There was a black dog that I called Happy Singh, which would always run over to me when I returned from school. I was bullied a lot at school and had no friends. So, I would sit with him and tell him about what happened at school,” Gakhar recalls. Though she pleaded with her parents for a dog, they never agreed. What she got, however, were two parakeets, whose being in a cage made her feel “pissed”. She would release them but they would only fly around inside her room. She had a few ducklings as well.
Leaves job to mother her dog
Life changed with the coming of Doodle and Gullak. Being a mother to Doodle, a Labrador, and Gullak, an Indie, for over six years now, helped her bust several myths about dog parenting. They were also the reason why she left her corporate job, where she was refused leave to be with Gullak, who had fallen severely ill.
She went on to start a home boarding for dogs in her three BHK flat. As her curiosity in “how a dog’s mind works” increased, she reached out to the Pune-based dog trainer and behaviourist Sunny Luthra who acted as a mentor.
Grateful clients
Kukkur Vachan’s Instagram page, where Gakhar posts snippets of her training sessions, has a following of 64,000 and its line of grateful clients is long. “My Indie dog, Brownie, was getting more and more food aggressive, where people couldn’t go near her food for fear of getting bitten. I would take her to the office everyday and nobody knew what to do. Every trainer I spoke to had differing opinions. It was Bhavna who came to our office and, in five sessions, taught all of us how to calm her down,” says Hani Wadhwani, co-owner of the Gurugram-based media production company, Shootguru.
Gakhar has conducted several workshops and walks in places like the Sunder Nursery. Though she had travelled to Chandigarh and Jaipur for sessions in the early days, she has decided to stick to only Delhi NCR due to the tight schedule. Gakhar has also built a community of dog parents who work towards conflict-reduction with regards to street dogs, by adoptions and spreading awareness about how to treat dogs. An important tip: “With dogs, every action you take is either making or breaking trust,” she says.