Pet care after owner death in India: what the law actually allows, and the plan that matters in the first three days

The first three days decide this, not the will

The first three days decide what happens to your animal, because a will is read weeks later and an animal needs feeding that evening. Everything else on this page is secondary to the question of who has a key and who knows the animal exists.

Start from a number. The RSPCA's guidance for police, councils and other responders who find a person dead at home states that no animal, regardless of their age, should be left unattended for longer than is likely to cause suffering and/or 24 hours. The same document is explicit that weather cuts that figure: be aware of warm or cold weather, as this will significantly reduce the time an animal can be left unattended, in which case the animal should be removed or have care provided for sooner.

In a flat in Delhi or Chennai in May, with the fans off because nobody is home to switch them on, 24 hours is not the figure. In a humid Mumbai monsoon week with the windows shut it is not the figure either. Our guide to heat safety for dogs in India covers what heat does to a confined animal; the point here is only that the clock is shorter than you think and nobody starts it for you.

The second thing in that guidance is easy to miss. Not all animals may be easily seen, the RSPCA notes, and it is considered good practice to look around the property, inside and out, for any signs of animals that need taking care of. A frightened cat under a bed is invisible. So is a rabbit on a back balcony. The people who come to your home after you die will be looking for documents and relatives, not for an animal behind a cupboard.

What England and Wales have that India does not

England and Wales run an inter-agency procedure for exactly this. The police or a council officer who finds a deceased person is expected to check every room and any outside space for animals, to contact the local council if the animal needs care, and to hand over to the next of kin where one can be found. Where the next of kin cannot be located or cannot help that day, it is the responsibility of the police or council to take care of the animal. Councils have a bereavement team with access to a national database that helps locate next of kin.

India has no published equivalent that we could find. We read the full index of the Animal Welfare Board of India's advisories and circulars on 21 October 2026. It carries 192 entries, covering cyclone rescue, stray animals, equines used as pack animals, case-property animals and the management of stray dogs in institutional premises. Not one of them concerns an animal found in the home of a person who has died, an owner admitted to hospital, or custody of a pet whose owner can no longer care for it.

That absence is the single most important fact on this page. There is no agency whose written job it is to notice your animal. The plan has to exist before it is needed, and it has to be held by somebody who is not you.

The six things to put in place this week

1. Give a spare key to two named people, not one, and write both names and numbers somewhere a stranger will look. One person travels, falls ill or does not answer.
2. Carry an emergency card in your wallet, next to the identity card you already carry. Four lines: I have a dog and a cat at home, this is the address, call this person first, call this person second.
3. Stick a note on the fridge and inside the front door naming each animal, its species, and who to call. A responder who opens your door reads what is in front of them.
4. Tell the building security guard and the two flats nearest yours that the animals exist. In most Indian apartment buildings the guard notices your absence before anyone else does. Our guide to pets in apartments in India covers how these conversations usually go.
5. Write one page of written care instructions and give a copy to each key-holder. What each animal eats, how much, twice or three times a day, any daily medication, the vet's name and number, the microchip number, and the behaviour that will surprise a stranger.
6. Register the microchip details in your own name with current contact numbers, and add a second contact. Our guide to pet microchipping in India explains how the registries work.

None of that costs money and none of it needs a lawyer. All of it works on the timescale that matters.

An animal is property in Indian law, not a beneficiary

An animal is property in Indian law because Indian statute reserves the capacity to hold property to persons, and an animal is not one. That single fact decides almost everything else about pet care after owner death.

The cleanest statutory anchor sits in the Indian Trusts Act, 1882. Section 9 states, in nine words, who may take a benefit under a trust: every person capable of holding property may be a beneficiary. Section 8 approaches the same point from the other side: the subject-matter of a trust must be property transferable to the beneficiary. An animal cannot hold property and property cannot be transferred to it, so an animal cannot be the beneficiary.

The Act's own Statement of Objects and Reasons confirms that the drafters meant person in the legal sense and considered how far it stretched. It records that section 9 declares that every person capable of holding property may be a beneficiary, and that as, under Act I of 1868, person includes a corporation, the Bill here varies from English Law, and that the variation is intentional. The category was widened deliberately, to take in companies. It was not widened to take in animals.

A leading Indian firm reached the same conclusion in print and added the practical reason. Writing in Mint in February 2020, the private client team at Cyril Amarchand Mangaldas said that as per Indian law, it is not possible to create a trust with pets as beneficiaries, because a pet is not recognized as a person who is capable of inheriting an estate of another person, and that in India, pets are deemed to be personal property, and one piece of property cannot hold the title to another piece of property. They added that trust law requires beneficiaries to be capable of enforcing the trust against the trustees, and that animals cannot take a trustee to court. That second argument is a practitioner's reading rather than a quoted section, and we flag it as such.

Indian law does recognise a non-human owner of property, and it is not an animal

This is worth knowing because it shows the gap is deliberate rather than accidental. In Yogendra Nath Naskar v. Commissioner of Income-Tax, Calcutta, the Supreme Court held that a Hindu idol is a juristic entity capable of holding property and of being taxed through its Shebaits who are entrusted with the possession and management of its property. Indian law has had a non-human legal person capable of holding property since long before 1969, with a named human manager attached to it. It has never extended that status to a dog.

The High Court that declared animals legal persons, and why it does not move your will

Two Indian High Courts have declared animals to be legal persons, and this gets quoted a great deal without its limits. In Narayan Dutt Bhatt v. Union of India and Others, Writ Petition (PIL) No. 43 of 2014, decided on 4 July 2018, the High Court of Uttarakhand at Nainital directed in terms that the entire animal kingdom including avian and aquatic are declared as legal entities having a distinct persona with corresponding rights, duties and liabilities of a living person, and that all the citizens throughout the State of Uttarakhand are hereby declared persons in loco parentis as the human face for the welfare/protection of animals.

Read what that direction is and is not. It is a High Court direction made in a public interest case about the plying of horse carts between Banbasa and Nepal, and the directions around it concern load limits for bullocks, the banning of spiked harnesses and the provision of shelters by municipal bodies. The in loco parentis declaration is expressly confined to the citizens of Uttarakhand. Nothing in it amends section 9 of the Indian Trusts Act, and we found no reported case in which an animal has taken under a will or held property in India on the strength of it.

Why India has no pet trust, and what the Trusts Act requires instead

India has no pet trust because the Indian Trusts Act, 1882 makes a certain beneficiary a condition of a valid trust, and because no Indian statute creates the exception that American and English law created for animals.

Section 6 of the Act sets out four certainties. A trust is created when the author of the trust indicates with reasonable certainty by any words or acts an intention on his part to create thereby a trust, the purpose of the trust, the beneficiary, and the trust-property, and transfers the trust-property to the trustee unless the trust is declared by will or the author is himself to be the trustee. The beneficiary is a separate certainty from the purpose, and it is the one an animal fails.

The Act's own illustrations show how unforgiving that is. Illustration (b) to section 6 reads: A bequeaths certain property to B hoping he will continue it in the family. This does not create a trust, as the beneficiary is not indicated with reasonable certainty. A clause naming a purpose but no beneficiary who can hold property fails as a trust even when the testator's wish is perfectly clear.

That is the whole of the difference between India and the pages that dominate this search. Every state in the United States has a pet trust statute. English law reached a similar place by a narrower route, through a line of cases that treated a trust for the maintenance of specific animals as an anomalous exception to the rule that a trust needs a beneficiary who can enforce it. India codified its trust law in 1882 and made the beneficiary a statutory certainty, so there is no room for a judge-made exception to grow in.

Is the answer genuinely settled?

On the statute, yes. Sections 6, 8 and 9 read together leave no space for a private trust whose beneficiary is a named animal, and we are not aware of any Indian decision holding otherwise. What is genuinely unsettled is something narrower and more interesting: what a court would do with a clause that is drafted as a trust for a purpose, with a human residuary beneficiary who takes whatever is left when the animal dies. Section 140 of the Indian Succession Act, 1925 contemplates the situation where a testator does not absolutely bequeath a fund so as to sever it from his own estate, but gives it for certain purposes, and part of those purposes cannot be fulfilled, in which case the fund remains part of the estate. That is a different structure from the one section 9 of the Trusts Act defeats, and we found no Indian authority deciding it either way. Any lawyer drafting it would be arguing from first principles.

The practical answer practitioners give is the same one Cyril Amarchand gave in 2020. Either bequeath to a trusted human with instructions, or bequeath to a reliable animal welfare organisation and entrust the animal to its care, accepting that such an organisation may not be able to use the money fully for only your pet's benefit. The next section is about why the first of those two needs more care than it is usually given.

The section that defeats the advice almost every page gives

Section 138 of the Indian Succession Act, 1925 is the provision that defeats the advice almost every page gives, because it strikes at the exact clause they recommend. Not one page we read on this search mentions it.

Here is the section in full, under the heading "Direction that fund be employed in particular manner following absolute bequest of same to or for benefit of any person": Where a fund is bequeathed absolutely to or for the benefit of any person, but the will contains a direction that it shall be applied or enjoyed in a particular manner, the legatee shall be entitled to receive the fund as if the will had contained no such direction.

The illustration printed under it makes the mechanism plain. A sum of money is bequeathed towards purchasing a country residence for A, or to purchase an annuity for A, or to place A in any business. A choses to receive the legacy in money. He is entitled to do so.

Now hold that against the standard recommendation. Cyril Amarchand's published answer is that the person makes a bequest under his will to a trusted human person, with clear instructions that the person should apply for the specific benefit of the deceased's pet. SNG & Partners, whose article is the highest-ranking Indian page on this question, goes further and recommends that the will also makes further stipulations such as the manner in which the funds are to be used, and other daily requirements for the upkeep of the animal. Neither article mentions section 138, nor does any other page we read on this search.

A clause reading "I leave Rs 5,00,000 to my sister, to be used for the care of my dog Bruno" is, on its face, an absolute bequest of a fund with a direction attached as to how it is to be applied. Section 138 says in terms that the legatee takes it as if the direction were not there. Whether a particular clause is caught is a question of construction for a court, and a clause drafted so that the gift is not absolute sits outside the section. But the risk is real, it is statutory, and a reader following the advice currently ranking for this query will never hear about it.

The section applies to a Hindu's will too, and we checked

This matters because Part VI of the Indian Succession Act does not apply to everyone by default. Section 58(1) provides that the provisions of Part VI shall not apply to testamentary succession to the property of any Muhammadan, nor, save as provided by section 57, to the property of any Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh or Jaina. Section 57 then applies the provisions set out in Schedule III to wills made by Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs and Jainas.

We read Schedule III. It lists sections 131, 132, 134, 135, 138, 139 and 140 among the provisions that apply. So section 138 reaches the will of a Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh or Jaina. For a Muslim testator, Part VI does not apply at all and the will is governed by Muslim personal law, which works on different principles; that is a question for a lawyer who practises in it, and we do not set it out here because we have not read those sources.

What survives: a conditional bequest with a gift over

The Act provides a structure of its own, and it is the one that gives somebody a reason to care whether the condition is kept. Section 131(1) provides that a bequest may be made to any person with the condition super-added, that, in case a specified uncertain event shall happen, the thing bequeathed shall go to another person, or that in case a specified uncertain event shall not happen, the thing bequeathed shall go over to another person. Its second illustration is almost on the nose: an estate is bequeathed to A with a proviso that if A shall dispute the competency of the testator to make a will, the estate shall go to B; A disputes it; the estate goes to B.

Section 134 gives the other half of the toolkit. A bequest may be made with the condition super-added that it shall cease to have effect in case a specified uncertain event shall happen, or in case a specified uncertain event shall not happen. Its third illustration, an estate bequeathed to A provided that if he shall not go to England within three years after the testator's death his interest shall cease, maps directly onto a condition that the caregiver must take the animal into their home within a stated number of days.

There is a trap in section 132, and it is the reason the drafting has to be precise: an ulterior bequest of the kind contemplated by section 131 cannot take effect, unless the condition is strictly fulfilled. A condition worded as "provided she looks after my dog properly" is not a condition anyone can strictly test. A condition worded in terms of a date, an address and a named animal is. Section 135 adds that the event relied on has to be one that could lawfully form the condition of a bequest, which is another question for the lawyer drafting it.

The common thread is enforcement. A direction binds nobody. A condition with a named alternative taker gives a specific person or organisation a direct financial interest in finding out whether your animal is actually being looked after, and that interest is the only enforcement mechanism available in a system with no pet trust.

What a will can do, how to make one, and why probate is slower than your animal

To make a will that works for an animal, name the caregiver, name a gift over, and keep the execution simple, because the Indian Succession Act asks very little of the document itself and a great deal of the thinking behind it.

The Act defines a will at section 2(h) as the legal declaration of the intention of a testator with respect to his property which he desires to be carried into effect after his death. Your animal is covered by that definition as property, which is the whole of why you can give it to somebody and cannot give anything to it.

The formalities are light. Section 59 provides that every person of sound mind not being a minor may dispose of his property by will. Section 63 requires that the testator sign or affix a mark to the will, that the signature be placed so that it appears intended to give effect to the writing as a will, and that the will be attested by two or more witnesses, each of whom has seen the testator sign or has received a personal acknowledgment of the signature, and each of whom signs in the presence of the testator. The section adds that it is not necessary for more than one witness to be present at the same time, and that no particular form of attestation shall be necessary. Two witnesses. No prescribed form. That is the statutory floor.

One widely repeated Indian story is worth treating carefully. SNG & Partners records that the industrialist Ratan Tata reportedly bequeathed ₹12 lakh to his German Shepherd, Tito, in his will, through his cook as a legal guardian. We have not seen the will and the firm itself writes "reportedly", so treat it as a press account rather than a fact. Read as a drafting lesson it is exact: the operative gift is to the cook, not to the dog, because the dog cannot take. The same article records a Madhya Pradesh farmer who willed half his ancestral property to his dog Jacky with the stipulation that whoever takes care of Jacky inherits the dog's share, and notes that the will has not been validated by a court.

Probate: required in Mumbai, Kolkata and Chennai, not in Bengaluru or Hyderabad

Section 213(1) provides that no right as executor or legatee can be established in any Court of Justice unless a court of competent jurisdiction in India has granted probate of the will under which the right is claimed, or letters of administration with the will annexed. Section 213(2) then limits that: it does not apply to wills made by Muhammadans or Indian Christians, and applies to wills made by a Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh or Jaina only where the will falls in the classes specified in clauses (a) and (b) of section 57.

Those classes are defined by historical jurisdictions: territories that in 1870 were subject to the Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal, and the local limits of the ordinary original civil jurisdiction of the High Courts at Madras and Bombay, plus wills made outside those limits so far as they relate to immoveable property inside them. In practice that means a Hindu's will made in Mumbai, Kolkata or Chennai needs probate before an executor can establish a right in court, and one made in Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Pune or most of the rest of the country does not. Note that the line runs inside Maharashtra: the Bombay High Court's ordinary original civil jurisdiction covers the city, not the state, so Mumbai and Pune can sit on opposite sides of it. The boundaries are historical and contested at the edges, so confirm your own position with a lawyer.

Why this belongs on a page about animals: probate takes months. Nothing about the caregiver clause operates until the will is proved, and in the meantime your animal is somewhere. The will decides where the animal lives next year. It does not decide where it sleeps tonight.

1. Settle the caregiver first, by asking them. A named caregiver who has not agreed is a wish, not a plan, and nobody is obliged to accept an animal under a will.
2. Settle a second caregiver, for the same reason you gave two people a key.
3. Settle the gift over. Decide now which named animal welfare organisation takes the money if the caregiver does not take the animal, and tell that organisation.
4. Settle the number. Work out a year of food, routine veterinary care and one serious illness, multiply by the animal's realistic remaining years, and write that figure down for the lawyer.
5. Settle what happens to the balance when the animal dies, so the clause has an end.
6. Settle who holds the original will and tell your caregiver where it is. A will nobody can find does nothing.

If there is no will, the animal goes where the furniture goes

Without a will the animal passes as part of your estate under intestate succession, exactly like a scooter or a cupboard, to whichever heirs your personal law gives it to.

This is the ordinary case in India, not the exception. An animal is property, a will is what redirects property away from the default, and in the absence of one the default applies. Intestate succession for Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs and Jains runs under the Hindu Succession Act, 1956; for Christians, Parsis and others it runs under Part V of the Indian Succession Act, 1925; for Muslims it runs under Muslim personal law. Which heirs those rules produce is outside this page, and a lawyer will tell you in one meeting.

What matters for the animal is the practical consequence. The heirs who inherit your animal are chosen by a rule about property, not by who likes the animal or who it knows. They may live in another city. They may be in the middle of a dispute about the flat. They are under no obligation to want a dog.

One statutory duty does land, and it lands on whoever actually ends up with the animal rather than on whoever inherits it. Section 3 of the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act, 1960 provides that it shall be the duty of every person having the care or charge of any animal to take all reasonable measures to ensure the well-being of such animal and to prevent the infliction upon such animal of unnecessary pain or suffering. That duty attaches to the relative who takes the key, the neighbour who starts feeding, and the executor who holds the estate.

The deterrent against the other outcome is weak and worth knowing honestly. Section 11(1)(i) of the same Act makes it an offence to, without reasonable cause, abandon any animal in circumstances which render it likely that it will suffer pain by reason of starvation or thirst. The penalty under section 11(1) for a first offence is a fine of not less than ten rupees and up to fifty rupees, which is Rs 10 to ₹50 at a figure set in 1960 and never revised. Our guide to reporting animal cruelty in India sets out how a complaint is actually made and what happens next; this page does not duplicate it.

Hospitalisation is the common case, and a power of attorney does not cover it

Plan for hospitalisation before you plan for death, because you are far more likely to be admitted than to die this year, and because the instrument most foreign pages recommend behaves differently in India.

Start with the denominators. The National Sample Survey's 75th round, covering 1,13,823 households across every district, found that 2.9 percent of Indians were treated as an in-patient at any time during the preceding 365 days, 2.6 percent in rural India and 3.4 percent in urban India. Among people aged 60 and above the figure was 8.5 percent all-India and 10.2 percent in urban India. Roughly one urban Indian in twenty-nine is admitted to a hospital in a given year, and about one urban Indian over sixty in ten.

An unplanned admission is the scenario that strands an animal most often, and it is the one almost nobody writes about. You do not get to go home and arrange things. A three-week admission after a fall or a cardiac event means twenty-one days of feeding, walking and medicating that somebody else has to do, starting that night.

Why a power of attorney is not the answer it is abroad

American and British pages routinely advise setting up a durable or lasting power of attorney so that someone can act for you if you lose capacity. India works differently, and the difference is in the Indian Contract Act, 1872. Section 201 provides: An agency is terminated by the principal revoking his authority; or by the agent renouncing the business of the agency; or by the business of the agency being completed; or by either the principal or agent dying or becoming of unsound mind; or by the principal being adjudicated an insolvent.

A power of attorney is an agency. On the plain words of section 201 it comes to an end when the principal becomes of unsound mind, which is precisely the moment a foreign durable power of attorney is designed to survive. India has no general statutory equivalent of the durable or lasting power of attorney for personal welfare decisions. Following American advice here produces a document that stops working at the point you most need it.

What a power of attorney can still do is substantial, and worth doing. While you remain of sound mind but are physically unable to act, because you are in a hospital bed after surgery, an attorney can operate a bank account, pay a boarding facility, sign for a delivery and deal with your landlord or society. Section 202 preserves the agency where the agent has an interest in the subject-matter, which is a narrow exception and not a workaround. Ask a lawyer what is possible in your situation rather than copying a template written for another country.

The admission plan, which is shorter than the will

1. Agree one person who will take the animals the same day, and one who will take them if the first cannot. Ask them properly, not in passing.
2. Keep ₹10,000 or whatever a fortnight of boarding and food costs where that person can reach it without your signature, or give them a standing arrangement with the facility.
3. Decide boarding or a sitter before you need either. Our guide to boarding or a pet sitter in India sets out what the stress measurements actually show and what to verify on each side.
4. Keep the written care instructions, the vaccination record and the vet's number in one labelled folder, and photograph it to your phone so a relative can be sent it from a hospital bed.
5. Give your vet written authorisation naming who may bring your animal in and who may consent to treatment in your absence. Without it a clinic can hesitate at the worst moment.
6. Tell the hospital. When you are admitted, say out loud that there are animals at home and who is dealing with them. Nobody will ask.

The four Indian situations this page was written for

Four situations account for most of the Indian cases, and each has one step that matters more than the rest.

India's household structure is changing faster than its planning habits. The 2011 Census recorded 3.7 percent of normal households as one-person households, a small share but a large number: 9.04 million households, up from 6.8 million a decade earlier. NITI Aayog records that the elderly make up a little over 10 percent of the population, about 104 million people, projected to reach 319 million and 19.5 percent of the total by 2050, and that 6 percent of the elderly and 9 percent of elderly women live alone. The same report elsewhere puts the elderly at 12 percent of the population rather than a little over 10 percent, an internal inconsistency we are flagging rather than averaging.

One: a single person living alone in a city away from family

Your nearest relative is a train journey away and your emergency contact is a colleague. The step that matters is the key, because nobody else has one and the building will not break your door for a cat. Give a key to two people in the same city and tell the security desk that the animals exist.

Two: an elderly owner whose children live abroad

The will is usually in order and the first week is not. Children in another time zone cannot feed an animal on the night of an admission, and a video call cannot open a door. The step that matters is a local caregiver with a key who has actually agreed, written into the plan alongside the overseas family rather than instead of them. Name that person in the will as caregiver and name the children as the people to be told.

Three: a joint family where the animal's status is contested

Several people live in the house, one person does all the feeding, and nobody has ever said whose animal it is. When that person dies the animal becomes part of a property conversation. The step that matters is documentation made now, in one name, across the municipal licence, the microchip registry and the veterinary file.

Four: the colony feeder who dies

This is the unwritten one. In thousands of Indian colonies a single person feeds eight or ten free-ranging dogs at the same hour every day, and when that person dies or is hospitalised the feeding simply stops. The dogs do not know why. They wait, then they range further, and the complaints and the conflicts follow. The step that matters is that the feeding is never one person's secret: tell at least two neighbours where the food is bought, what it costs, which dogs are sterilised and which are not, and which vet knows them. Our guides to feeding community dogs in India and to community cats in India cover the law and practice of the feeding itself, including how a designated feeding spot is fixed; what is missing everywhere is succession for the feeder.

What Indian shelters actually do, and what the outcome data shows

Indian shelters take animals in on a case-by-case basis through personal contact, because we could not document a single Indian scheme that registers an animal in advance and commits to taking it when its owner dies.

In the United Kingdom these schemes are ordinary. Blue Cross runs Pet Peace of Mind, which is free, accepts applications for up to four pets per household, requires dogs, cats and horses to be microchipped and registered to the applicant's name and address, supplies suggested wording for the applicant's will, and asks the executor or a nominated Pet Guardian to contact the charity when the time comes. The RSPCA runs a comparable Home for Life scheme and its responder guidance notes that it is unlikely to be able to assist in a sudden-death case unless the animal is already registered on it.

We looked for an Indian equivalent and did not find one. The search surfaced Indian shelters and sanctuaries doing substantial work, and large organisations that run lifetime care for street dogs, but no published scheme under which an owner registers a pet in advance against their own death. The Animal Welfare Board of India's 192 advisories and circulars contain nothing on the subject. The practitioner advice is correspondingly informal: bequeath the money to a reliable organisation and entrust the animal to its care, which may mean the money is not spent on your animal alone.

The outcome data does not exist, and that is the finding

We could not find published figures from any Indian shelter on what happens to animals that arrive because an owner died: not intake counts, not rehoming rates, not length of stay, not euthanasia rates. We are stating that as an absence rather than guessing at it. Anyone who tells you what percentage of these animals are rehomed in India is not reading a source, because we could not find one to read.

The honest comparison is what a candid organisation says about itself. Blue Cross states plainly that it cannot restrict the use of a gift to a particular pet, that there is no way to guarantee a donation would be spent on that pet's care by the new owners, that an application can be rejected if the animal has a certain medical condition or is aggressive and cannot be managed, and that it may be necessary to euthanise a small number of pets for veterinary or behavioural reasons. That is what a functioning scheme sounds like when it is being truthful. An Indian organisation that promises you more than that, with no written agreement, is promising something it has not costed.

• Ask in your lifetime, in writing. A verbal assurance from a volunteer is not an arrangement, and the volunteer may have moved on by the time it is needed.
• Ask what the organisation's capacity actually is, how many animals it currently holds, and whether it has ever taken an animal on these terms before.
• Ask what it would do with an animal it cannot rehome, and accept a candid answer rather than a reassuring one.
• Name the organisation as the gift over in the will, so it has a documented stake rather than a favour to do.
• Prefer an organisation your animal has already visited. A frightened animal arriving at a strange facility on the worst day of its life does better somewhere it recognises.
• Verify that the organisation is registered and, where relevant, recognised, and keep its registration details with your will.

If the destination is adoption rather than a shelter, the groundwork is the same groundwork a good adopter does. Our guide to adopting a dog in India sets out what Indian shelters ask of an adopter, which is a useful preview of what your caregiver will have to satisfy.

The one page to write this week, before you see anyone

Write a single page of written care instructions this week, because it costs nothing, needs no lawyer, and is the document that will actually be read.

A will is read after probate. A care sheet is read by a frightened relative standing in your kitchen at eleven at night. Write it for that person, in plain sentences, and assume they have never fed a dog.

Print three copies. One on the fridge, one in the folder with the vaccination record, one with each key-holder. Put the same four lines on a card in your wallet. Update it when the food, the medication or the people change, which is roughly once a year.

Then make the will, with a lawyer, naming a caregiver who has agreed, a second caregiver, a conditional bequest rather than a bare direction, and a named gift over. Tell the caregiver where the original is kept.

Two last things, both practical. Keep the microchip registration current, because it is the one record that links a found animal back to your plan rather than to a stranger; our guide to how to find a lost pet in India explains what that registration is worth when an animal goes missing in the confusion after a death. And if you have been putting this off because the subject is grim, note that the same hour of work covers the far more likely case where you come back in three weeks and find the animal fed, walked and slightly cross with you.

For the other direction, when the animal goes first rather than you, our guide to when your pet dies in India covers the euthanasia decision, cremation and burial law, costs and grief. This page is the mirror of that one, and between them they cover both ways round.