Today, May 14, is Stray Dog Day. So says The Welfare of Stray Dogs, a nonprofit working to eradicate rabies and reduce the stray dog population in Mumbai (Bombay), India. Amongst the honorees at the organization's event today is Jerry, the smiling dog pictured here, who resides at the Helen Keller Institute.

I wish I had known about The Welfare of Stray Dog when I was in Mumbai; I would have paid them a visit. They have a great website, very well designed, and seem to have made real headway towards helping dogs (according to their website, they have sterilized 27,000 dogs!). In the rural parts of India, where there isn't the same concentrated effort to deal with this problem, I was seeing skinny, mangy momma dogs and sickly puppies; not so in Mumbai. The several times that I have been in Mumbai (and not just the tourist areas, but the suburbs as well), I  noticed that the few street dogs I did see looked particularly healthy.

Photo: from Indian Writing and Straying Around