Meet Shiranee Pereira, the activist who speaks up for the voiceless

Shiranee Pereira is quietly but insistently arguing that dogs can and must be replaced by tech and AI in testing drugs. More to the point, drug firms are listening. She is among India's new Gandhians

Every email sent by Shiranee Pereira, who started the Chennai chapter of People For Animals, ends with this Franciscan blessing:

May God bless us with DISCOMFORT: at easy answers, half-truths, and superficial relationships, so that we may live deep within our hearts.

May God bless us with ANGER: at injustice, oppression, and exploitation of people and the earth so that we may work for justice, freedom, and peace.

May God bless us with TEARS: to shed for those who suffer from pain, hunger and war, so that we may reach out our hands to comfort them and turn their pain into joy.

And may God bless us with enough FOOLISHNESS to believe that we can make a difference in this world, so that we will do what others say cannot be done.

St Francis of Assisi is considered the patron saint of the animals and his endorsement is crucial for Pereira’s charges: Around 1000 animals, including, dogs, cats, horses, donkeys, monkeys and others, at the People for Animals sanctuary on the outskirts of Chennai. The lame, the blind, the mad, the rejected, the abused and the abandoned… they’re all welcome here and they will all be cared for with tenderness and single-minded attention.

Pereira is a singular individual. And, without being conscious of it, she has internalised the Gandhian method of reconciliation: That there’s no bad in anyone, and if we only rouse the ethical and the just in everyone and make sure no one loses face, everyone would win. Since 1932, the Corporation of Chennai had been eliminating street dogs via electrocution at a designated facility — the Basin Bridge Lethal Chamber. In 1995, Pereira took up the battle with the civic authorities and managed to end this barbaric practice. Acknowledging that street dogs were a problem, she offered a solution: Chennai’s first mass animal birth control/immunisation programme for these dogs at the same premises — the lethal chamber. Now, around 10,000 dogs are sterilised and immunised every year. “The programme has been so wonderfully successful that the incidence of human rabies in the city have dropped from 49 persons per annum in 1995 to nill in 2009 as per the records of the Health Department of the Corporation of Chennai. This is turn helped to evoke a state-wide order for the implementation of the animal birth control programme in Tamil Nadu and stop all killing of stray dogs,” she said.

She then scaled up her programme several notches. In 2003, she put together the “The Science of Alternatives movement” in India to promote the universal concept of 3Rs (replacement, reduction and refinement) in the use of animals in research and education. India’s first-ever Conference on Alternatives to Laboratory Research on animals was held in Delhi that year, under the aegis of Committee for the Purpose of Control and Supervision of Experiments on Animals (CPCSEA), Ministry of Environment and Forests. Pereira was an expert consultant with the CPCSEA then. Globally, 500 scientists and students were invited. The concept of alternatives to dogs in laboratory research, she said, was so new, shocking and morally provoking for the Indian scientific community that hundreds of the participants walked out of the conference. But the first seed was sown to better laboratory animal welfare in India.

The coup was a chance meeting with IBM and the launch of Project, DONT — Dogs are Not for Testing. DONT is a project that seeks to augment the precision and prediction of drug/chemical toxicity by replacing the dog in testing with the power and potential of machine learning and Artificial/Augmented Intelligence. She realised that she would be treading on the toes of the multi-billion-dollar drug discovery industry, in which testing on animals is a manditory part. But she reckoned that cognitive computing and read-across strategies, using Big Data, could serve as a robust and far more predictive, economical and humane replacement to the use of dogs in toxicity testing. IBM’s Watson would be the vehicle for this. She found enthusiastic support from the pharma industry — no one wants to be seen as heartless, after all. This was in 2018 and though the details of the project are confidential, she is certain it will take off.

Pereira is also negotiating a buy-in from the famed racing industry of Tamil Nadu, the Madras Race Club to launch a rehabilitation facility for race horses. These horses, in their prime, earn so much for their owners but are either sold to breeders or abandoned when they are judged too old to work. The racing industry in Tamil Nadu is large and solvent enough to set up a retirement facility for race horses and does not want to be seen as cruel and exploitative. Pereira is merely trying to appeal to the better side of their nature.

Every animal at the PFA shelter in Chennai has a personal connect to Pereira’s life. Laxmi, the donkey (featured in the picture), for instance, is a carrot thief, she exclaimed with affection. She records with deep sorrow, the passing of a rescued Labrador, Ms Cherry, who was dumped at the shelter by a cruel breeder. Ms Cherry was used as a breeding machine and was abandoned when she developed a liver ailment. Pereira nursed her back to health and she began following Pereira like a shadow, laughing and chattering with her, but never letting her out of her sight, maybe because she was afraid of being discarded again. Ms Cherry lived for four more years but the liver and kidneys packed up and she could not be saved. This and other stories: At PFA, Red Hills.