Our special shoot with the newly weds, actors Randeep Hooda and Lin Laishram begins with a chase- to get a hold of their pet cat, Toffee, who prefers to run around instead of posing! “Being owned by a cat is a new experience,” exclaims Hooda as we finally get talking on Love Your Pet Day today.
One of the many things that the two bond over, for sure, is their common love for animal. He tells us that his first pet was Tiger, a pomeranian, who was born around the same time as him. “For the first eight-nine years of my life, he was my best buddy. Then we had labradors. I used to pick up puppies from the street and hide them in my nani’s money plants. She would shoo them out and I would rescue them again,” he laughs. Lin meanwhile had cats and cows as her companion growing up. Her love for anything animal reflects in the gifts Randeep picks for her. “Whenever he sees something related to animals at the places he visits, he gets it, especially elephants,” she shares.
Hooda’s fondness has grown into a passion to rescue and care for animals. Apart from this it’s widely known too, how good a horse rider he is. He currently owns seven horses, and also a dog, Bambi, who he picked up from someone’s courtyard.
At this point, Toffee is again in the mood to pose, so Hooda gets talking about how she came into their lives. “She was being chased by a male cat aggressively, so a person in my office chased him away and brought him to the office. We were thinking what to do, they took her to the vet and fed her, got her inoculated. She stayed, but you can’t control her. You saw it in the shoot. Cats will take over the world. We are planning to build a house in the wild by the way,” he laughs. Lin says while Bambi adopted her when she moved in with Randeep, she is waiting for his horses to recognise her.
“Randeep would be out on shoots often, so it would be only me and Bambi in the house. She was like a watch dog, no one could enter the room when she was there, she would protect me. Now Toffee has adopted us,” she laughs.
Being animal lovers, what breaks the duo’s hearts is the fate many pets suffered after the Covid lockdowns. It has been reported widely how many pets were abandoned after the lock downs got over. Hooda says, “That’s the biggest misconception people have while adopting pets. They feel love and affection initially… when it wears off, you have to be a caretaker and be responsible. Like Bambi started getting aggressive, we had to deal with it.” Lin chimes in, “You have to make a lot of adjustments and be a pet parent.”
Hooda adds, “That’s where the real test of you begins as a human being, when a small puppy grows up. Humans are selfish I guess, that’s why they abandoned their pets. It is very unfair and I hope people don’t do that.”
