Hyderabad: Painting competition held for government school children

Hyderabad: Observing World Animal Month, Youngistaan Foundation organised a painting competition for close to 500 children to create awareness on animal abuse and animal behaviour at a government-aided school at Uppal. In recent times, Telangana has seen major deaths of stray animals where small puppies were burnt alive, thrown in a pond, poisoned and shot to death. The organisation plans to conduct more such programs for over 6000 children in the next two months, and more in the future. The session concluded with an interactive discussion between volunteers and children about creating safe spaces for animals.

A painting competition that was organised by the Youngistaan animal heroes programme, a wing of the Youngistaan foundation is to fight animal abuse and creates awareness among children and youth on animal abuse and animal behaviour. The painting competition was held with the topic 'A day in a stray animal's life', where the children were asked to draw an incident they remember of a bird, a dog, a cat, a camel, a horse or other animals along with how they are treated and how they treat the animals.

The organisation used painting competition to begin this discussion with children and plans to conduct the same competition at other schools till the end of the month and is hoping to reach over 6000 children with this special world animal month campaign throughout November and December.

While discussing with the children on the painting competition, Navya Jyothi, a student from Grade IV said "I drew an ice-cream vendor feeding ice-creams to the stray dogs and cats. I painted this because I want everyone to do the same. D. Kiran from Grade V said "I drew a bird along with a food bowl. Birds also feel hungry and we should give food to them."

Hrishikesh from Grade V said "I drew a GHMC dustbin where a stray animal is walking towards the bin and opposite to it a milk bowl is kept. A lot of dogs eat unhygienic food but I'm giving him nutritious milk."

Another student of 4th class, V Divya Sai said "I drew two boys. One is a good boy and another is a bad boy respectively. A bad boy is hitting stones at the dog ad Good boy is explaining not to hit.

Volunteers mingled themselves with children by having a fruitful discussion for fifteen minutes on providing safe spaces for our animals as even they are a vital part of the ecosystem.

To curtail the percentage of deaths of animals due to abuse, Youngistaan Foundation, a Hyderabad based NGO had planned a two-month awareness painting campaign, speaking on which, the founder, Arun Daniel Yellamaty, says, "We have seen so many cases of animals getting abused and no one does much about it, we complain and still are many unresolved cases against people who ill-treated animals. But, one thing we can do is prevent it from repeating. So we are using arts to create awareness campaigns among young people. This is not a one time program, it's going to be our regular program and we will be visiting more colleges, schools, and workplaces to create awareness and to make a community hero who will work for their community animals as well, a lot of work to the done."

Apart from this the organisation also runs an active programme on food and nutrition, education, Menstrual Hygiene Management, child sexual abuse for boys and girls and works on seven UN SDGs.