Pet care, explained for India

Vaccination schedules, honest price ranges, municipal rules and emergency guidance, written for the way pet care actually works here, not adapted from American advice.

Why we write these

Most pet advice online is written for somewhere else. Vaccination schedules get copied from American sources that assume different diseases, different climates and different laws. Cost guides quote dollars. Registration advice assumes a single national system, when India has none, dog licensing is municipal, so the rules change when you cross a city boundary.

India has an estimated 30 million pet dogs and a pet population heading towards 39 million, and roughly 70% of Indian pet parents are first-time owners. That combination, a large, fast-growing, mostly inexperienced audience served largely by advice written for other countries, is why these guides exist.

How we approach them

Three rules we hold ourselves to:

• Real numbers, stated as ranges. Veterinary pricing in India is unregulated and varies enormously between a metro chain clinic and a neighbourhood practice. We publish the range rather than a single figure that would be wrong for most readers.
• We name the cheaper option. Government veterinary hospitals administer the same core vaccines at a fraction of private prices. It is not in our commercial interest to tell you that. It is true, so we do.
• We say when something is unsettled. Veterinary telemedicine in India has no formal regulatory framework, unlike human telemedicine, which has had guidelines since 2020. Where the rules are genuinely unclear, we say so rather than inventing certainty.

What these guides are not

None of this is veterinary advice for your specific animal. A guide cannot examine your pet, and the most useful thing many of these articles do is help you decide whether you need someone who can. If you are worried about your animal right now, contact a vet rather than reading further.

We are also the team behind the Pawspert app, which is how we can afford to write these. Where an article mentions the app, it is because the app genuinely solves the problem being discussed, usually keeping records you would otherwise lose.

The guides