Our Story

Everyone has a dream. It takes time and backbreaking effort to make it happen, but if you persist, it will.

All Creatures Great and Small (ACGS) is the vision of one of India’s leading human and animal rights activists, Ms Anjali Gopalan. In 2012 Anjali was named by “Time” Magazine as one of the world’s 100 most influential people for her pioneering work on HIV/AIDs and LGBT rights in India. She established Delhi’s first HIV clinic in 1994 and the Naz Foundation (India) Trust, an HIV/AIDS service organization that concentrates on prevention and care.

She is the recipient of countless awards for her ground breaking work. In March 2007, Anjali was honored as a Woman Achiever by India’s Ministry of Women and Child Development. On 25 October 2013 Anjali was awarded Chevalier de la Legion d’Honneur, which is the highest award from France.

She has been passionate about animals and their rights since a child. In 2010 she volunteered at a supposedly well-run shelter in Delhi and found the place alarmingly lacking in care and compassion. Having worked with children with HIV for over two decades she applied her experience and knowledge that both children and animals cannot heal and be happy in a joyless place. Her vision is, as it had been with children born with HIV, to create a sanctuary that would be their home. ACGS was designed to be a sanctuary for sick and disabled animals that were not capable of surviving in the wild or on the street until they could either be rehabilitated or adopted.

She named the sanctuary All Creatures Great and Small after the book written by her favourite writer, Dr. James Herriot, a British vet who wrote about his many experiences with animals in a humorous and compassionate way. “My father gave me all his books to read when I was in class five. I fell in love with the man and his mission to save and heal animals.”

The New Delhi shelter where Anjali initially volunteered had only dogs. India has the highest number of stray dogs in the world so the needs of stray dogs in India are huge and demanding. Given that dogs are closely associated with rabies, and India is home to one third of the worlds rabies cases it is understandable that stay dogs are often stigmatised and feared by a large number of the population. This is further exacerbated by India’s burgeoning middle class adopting Western notions of pet ownership, buying pedigree dogs, but many pedigreed dogs end up on the street, the castoffs of unsuccessful breeders or owners who tire of the experiment. Anjali’s initially plan was to establish a sanctuary for dogs in distress. In fact, the first fifty five animals in the sanctuary were dogs that moved to ACGS from the shelter where she volunteered as they no longer had the capacity to care for them. Dog numbers grew almost immediately, as soon as people heard about the sanctuary. They came in droves – accident cases, homeless puppies, performing dogs rescued from a circus, abandoned pets, breeders’ rejects, victims of human cruelty, old, blind, arthritic, cancer-ridden, amputated, all desperately in need of care.

Then came the large animals which were not initially in her blueprint. We were quite unprepared for them, but because we were in a rural area, requests to take them in began to pour in and we geared ourselves up to handle them. So rescued goats, horses from circuses, sick cows, bulls, buffaloes, abused mules and donkeys became our permanent residents. Then came the birds. Abandoned roosters, emus, injured peacocks, parrot fledglings, hens, ducks and geese joined our family followed by rabbits and cats.

So we first built the dog shelter, then stables and fodder storage barns for the large animals, then ponds for the water birds, then rabbit warrens, emu runs, the aviary, and finally the cattery. We are living up to our name!

When we bought the land, it was a patch of nothingness. Not a single tree or shrub. So first we planted trees and then constructed the various animal enclosures. Despite the poor soil we now have a good organic farming area where we grow vegetables, fruits and herbs. The soil is now regenerated. In our neighbouring plot of another two acres we are growing mainly fodder for our large animals.