Salil Fernandez Aims to get Animal Welfare Bill through Film

The man behind the documentary ‘The Tails of Boo-Boo & Cuddly Poo’, Salil Fernandez is known as a filmmaker for horror-thrillers and crime. However, the lockdown prompted him to focus on the actual horror going around in society on an everyday basis.

Salil is known as the ‘dogwala’ in his circle of friends and family. The documentary maker grew up in the household of pet lovers and started to help out strays in what he terms as ‘cushy’ way by raising funds to help out.

The story of Salil is an encouraging one, and for him, it was in 2013 when he started to get more involved on the grassroots level. Eventually, people started to call him whenever an animal required help. He would take care of the animal and then get it adopted instead of putting it out on the streets back. He soon realized that he found immense gratification by doing that.

During the lockdown, Salil also started to feed the strays, and now considers them his neighborhood pets. However, this raised a few eyebrows. According to him, he sarcastically says, “Concerned friends called me and told me to be careful about touching animals during Covid times. I didn’t know what to tell these well-educated yet ill-informed people,” he rues. It is the man-animal conflict he has tried to address in the film.

Some people come with all the guns blazing when someone tries to feed the strays and claim that the more you feed, the more will gather and make the area dirty.

People seem to be forgetting that they do not own any of the pavements and streets. The strays have rights over the lands too.

Salil being a horror-thriller and crime writer mentions that he is appalled by the behavior of people around him. Whenever he reads the cruelty cases, he feels bad for animals. It is typically a sociopathic behavior; the FBI classifies this as serial killer behavior. However, people get away with it scot-free. However, he hopes that the documentary will go beyond the movie to become a movement. He hopes to achieve that with this documentary he can go beyond it and make it a movement. With this documentary, he wants an amendment in the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act, 1960.

Salil also finds it absurd that the law levies only a Rs 50 fine on acts of cruelty towards the animals. The people who harm the animals are the ones capable to harm their loved ones too. If the film by Salil helps to get the Animal welfare Bill over the finishing line, it will be a great achievement than any award.

To get proper promotions, he has also successfully managed to pull several celebrity voices for the film including Jimm Sarbh and Shraddha Kapoor.

Apart from the bigger cause, the filmmaker also wants to sensitize people to the plight of stray animals. The film very well advocates the cause of community adoption. If every building or society can adopt these free-roaming pets and split the expenses among themselves, it becomes easy to take care of the animals.

It is also one way to solve the problem as the NGOs or government alone can’t do anything about it.

The initial duration of the movie was 15-minute only, however, it is not increased to 2 hours 45 minutes. The project was supposed to be only a 2-3 day project, but it kept growing.

On asking about the inspiration behind the quirky names of the characters, he has named after his stray pets. The names of the animated characters include Boo Boo being a cat and Cuddly Poo being a dog. The idea is to make people see the strays around them as cute creatures and refer to them in the same way with terms of endearment that girlfriends-boyfriends use for each other instead of any other harsh words.

This way, people will be able to feel more towards the strays.