Dog and cat festival guide
Sankranti and Pongal with your pet: the Bhogi morning, the cattle in the street, and the til on the floor
Everyone writes about kite string. Nobody writes about the dawn bonfire that quadrupled Chennai's measured PM2.5, the bull that arrives at your gate, or the sesame that is half fat by weight.
Quick answer
Sankranti pet safety turns on four things rather than one. Keep animals indoors through the Bhogi bonfire morning, when Chennai's measured PM2.5 roughly quadrupled. Walk away from decorated cattle, processions and bull events. Keep til laddoo, chikki and sugarcane off the floor, because sesame is nearly half fat and cane fibre does not digest. Check kite string separately. Hazards differ by state, so plan by where you live.
This guide is general information for Indian pet owners and is not a diagnosis. Always consult a registered veterinarian near you before acting on anything you read here, and treat any sudden change in your pet's condition as urgent.
What Sankranti actually is, and why your state decides the hazard
Sankranti is one solar event observed as at least seven different festivals, and the thing that threatens your animal is decided almost entirely by which of them your street keeps. There is no single Sankranti hazard, which is why generic advice fails here.
The astronomical event is the same everywhere. It is a harvest marker, which in the south lands after the north-east monsoon has finished and Lord Indra has been thanked for the rains. What happens on the ground is not the same at all. In Tamil Nadu the festival runs over three or four consecutive days named Bhogi, Thai Pongal, Mattu Pongal and Kaanum Pongal, with Thai Pongal usually falling on 14 or 15 January. In Andhra Pradesh and Telangana the same four days are Bhogi, Pedda Panduga, Kanuma and Mukkanuma. In Gujarat it is Uttarayan and it is about kites. In Punjab the evening before is Lohri and then Maghi. In Assam it is Magh Bihu.
For an animal, those are four genuinely different weeks. A dog in Ahmedabad faces fallen kite string. A dog in Hyderabad faces a dawn bonfire outside the gate. A dog in a Mysuru village faces decorated cattle being driven across a burning hay stack. A cat in a humid Chennai flat faces a morning when the windows cannot be opened. Writing one list for all of them is how most of the pages on this query go wrong.
The regional differences are not decoration, and they are the reason this page is organised by place before it is organised by hazard. A household in Pune exchanging tilgul and a household in Bengaluru passing round ellu bella are keeping the same festival and handling two different mixtures. A household in Punjab is standing around an open fire in the cold. A household in Madurai is watching bulls. Work out which of those is yours, then read only the sections that apply.
| Where | What it is called and what happens | The hazard specific to it |
|---|---|---|
| Tamil Nadu | Pongal, over four days: Bhogi, Thai Pongal, Mattu Pongal, Kaanum Pongal | Bhogi bonfires of household waste at dawn, then cattle bathed, horns painted, garlanded and taken in processions on Mattu Pongal |
| Andhra Pradesh and Telangana | Bhogi, Pedda Panduga, Kanuma, Mukkanuma. Kanuma is dedicated to cattle and other domestic animals | Bhogi bonfires, Gangireddu decorated bulls led to the doorstep, and kodi pandem cockfighting crowds in coastal Andhra |
| Karnataka | Ellu Birodhu, the exchange of ellu-bella: white sesame, fried groundnuts, cut dry coconut and jaggery | A sesame, groundnut and coconut mixture handed round at child height, plus Kichchu Haisodu, where cattle are made to cross a burning hay stack |
| Maharashtra | Makar Sankranti, with tilgul, sweets made from sesame seeds and jaggery, exchanged | Sesame and jaggery sweets in every house and pocket for days |
| Gujarat and Rajasthan | Uttarayan, dominated by kite flying | Manja, the glass-coated or synthetic kite string, which our own separate page covers in full |
| Punjab, Jammu and Himachal Pradesh | Lohri the evening before, then Maghi. Lohri generally falls on 13 or 14 January | An open evening bonfire in a public square, with sesame seeds, jaggery, peanuts and popcorn tossed into it, and children going door to door |
| Assam | Magh Bihu or Bhogali Bihu, beginning at dawn with the Meji ceremony | Buffalo and bulbul fights, for which the Gauhati High Court quashed the permitting notification in December 2024 |
Look up this year's date before you plan anything
The dates move, and two reliable sources already disagree about them. The encyclopaedic position is that Bhogi falls on 13 January and Makar Sankranti on 14 January, with 15 January in a leap year Wikipedia, 'Makar Sankranti'. What actually happened in Chennai is different. The Tamil Nadu Pollution Control Board measured Bhogi day 2026 as the twenty-four hours from 8 am on 13 January to 8 am on 14 January, with the smog arriving on Wednesday 14 January, and in 2024 the city burned its Bhogi fires on Sunday 14 January.
We are publishing both rather than picking one. The honest instruction is that mid-January is a moving target that also differs between Tamil Nadu and the Telugu states, so you check your own local calendar for the current year and work backwards from it. A plan built on last year's dates will be a day out.
The Bhogi morning is a measured, one-day air spike
The Bhogi bonfire produces a particulate spike large enough that India's own pollution boards publish it, and it lands at dawn, which is exactly when most Indian dogs are walked.
On Bhogi, households light bonfires at dawn with logs of wood, other solid fuels and wooden furniture that is no longer useful. In practice the pile is wider than that. Residents of Ennore told a reporter they burned old mats, clothes and pillows, and the Tamil Nadu Pollution Control Board runs night patrolling with the city corporation and the police specifically to prevent the burning of plastic waste, tyres and tubes. A study of Visakhapatnam named firewood, plastics and rubber tyres as the fuel and treated the Bhogi bonfire as a distinct annual pollution event.
The numbers are not small. Across all fifteen Greater Chennai Corporation zones in 2026, the air quality index before Bhogi was satisfactory everywhere, ranging from 52 at Alandur to 89 at Perungudi. On Bhogi day it rose in every single zone, to between 140 at Thiruvotriyur and 273 at Perungudi, with four zones in the poor band.
PM2.5 is the figure that matters for a lung. It went from a pre-Bhogi range of 20-37 micrograms per cubic metre to 72-112 on Bhogi day, against a national twenty-four hour standard of 60. PM10 reached 120-257, against a standard of 100. The year 2024 was worse on the manual survey, at 52-111 for PM2.5 and 118-289 for PM10 across the same fifteen stations.
Two official Indian instruments, one city, one morning, a fivefold gap
Here is the finding that no pet page carries, and it is the one that should change what you do. On Bhogi day 2024 the pollution board's manual twenty-four hour survey put the worst PM2.5 in Chennai at 111 micrograms per cubic metre. On the same day, in the same city, the Central Pollution Control Board's continuous station at Perungudi recorded PM2.5 reaching 500.
Both figures are correct and they are not measuring the same thing. One is an average spread across a whole day and night. The other is what the air was actually like at a moment. A bonfire morning is a short, intense event, and averaging it over twenty-four hours divides the peak by the hours of clean air that follow it.
A reported Bhogi-day figure of 111 micrograms per cubic metre and a real-time reading of 500 at the same station describe the same morning. Your animal is not exposed to the average. It is exposed to the hour, and the hour is the 6 am walk. Move the walk, or skip it.
The practical reading is simple. Do not take the usual early walk on Bhogi morning. Wait until the smoke has visibly lifted and the sun is up, make the walk short, and choose an internal lane rather than a road where fires were lit. Visibility in Chennai in 2024 was about twenty feet in places and flights were disrupted at the airport in both 2024 and 2026 SV Krishna Chaitanya. If an aircraft cannot land, your dog does not need a walk.
This page covers one morning. The chronic, months-long picture, how to read an air quality index as a pet owner, which animals are hit first, and what an air purifier does and does not buy you, all sit on our guide to air pollution and your pet in India, and this page does not repeat any of it.
The fire itself, and the street it leaves behind
A Bhogi or Lohri bonfire differs from every other festival flame an Indian pet meets because it is large, outdoors, on a public route, and unattended long after the family has gone inside.
Every other open flame in the Indian festival calendar is small, indoors and watched. This one is not. It is built on a road, a plot or a village square, it is lit before most people are properly awake, and it is left to burn down. In Punjab the Lohri bonfire is lit at sunset in the main village square and people sit around it until the fire dies out, with sesame seeds, jaggery, sugar-candy, rewaries, peanuts and popcorn tossed in. That last detail is the one that moves a dog. Food is going into and around a fire at ground level, and a dog that smells roasting groundnut will go to it.
The hours after matter more than the hours during
A wood and furniture fire does not go out when the people leave. It becomes a low mound of ash with embers inside it, sitting on the route you walk at 6 am, and from a standing human's height it looks grey and finished. A paw does not test a surface before it commits to it. Nails, screws, hinges, wire from burnt furniture, melted plastic and broken glass also end up in that mound, and they stay there until somebody sweeps.
- Walk the route yourself, without the dog, before the first walk after a bonfire. One pass tells you where every fire site is.
- Keep the lead short past any ash mound, on the far side of the road, for at least two days.
- Check paw pads after every walk that week, between the toes as well as underneath.
- Keep cats off terraces and compounds on the morning after, because a cat that has been shut in goes straight out and investigates.
- Report a fire still smouldering on a public road to your municipal body rather than trying to put it out yourself.
Burn depth, what a thermal burn looks like on an animal, why a thick coat delays the answer, and what to do in the first ten minutes are all covered properly on our guide to diyas, candles and burn risk to pets. Read that one before you need it. This section only adds the part that is specific to a large outdoor fire: nobody owns it, nobody is watching it, and it is on your walking route rather than in your living room.
A tethered animal that panics cannot leave. Bonfires draw crowds, children and sudden noise, and a dog on a short rope beside one has no option but to fight whatever approaches it. If your animal must be outdoors while a fire is lit, it is on a lead in a person's hand or it is behind a closed door, and nothing in between.
What is legal to burn, and what is not
Open burning of waste is prohibited outright in India, with a named money penalty and a named authority to complain to, and almost no pet owner knows the rule exists.
The National Green Tribunal directed in December 2016, in the Almitra H. Patel proceedings, that there shall be complete prohibition on open burning of waste on lands, including at landfill sites. For each incident the violator is liable to pay environmental compensation of Rs 5,000 for simple burning and Rs 25,000 for bulk waste burning, recoverable as arrears of land revenue.
Telangana put that into a state order. G.O.Ms.No. 27 of 10 July 2017, issued by the Environment, Forests, Science and Technology Department, repeats the prohibition and fixes the competent authority. For burning done by the public, communities, a concessionaire or a private project proponent, the authority that levies the ₹5,000 is the concerned Urban Local Body or Gram Panchayat. Where the burning is done by the local body itself, the Telangana State Pollution Control Board levies it instead.
The rule is about waste, not about a religious observance. A bonfire of firewood and cow-dung cakes is not the target of it. A pile containing tyres, plastic sheeting, PVC, foam mattresses or treated wood is waste being burned in the open, and that is what the order and the rupee figures address. Treat it as a civic route rather than an argument with a neighbour.
For an owner, the useful consequence is procedural rather than confrontational. You now know which office receives the complaint, you know the compensation figure, and you know the burning of plastic and tyres is the specific thing the pollution board patrols for. A message to your ward office in the week before Bhogi, asking for the usual patrol on your lane, costs nothing and is more likely to work than anything you say on the morning itself.
Cattle in the street: Kanuma, Mattu Pongal and the bull at your gate
Sankranti is the one week in the Indian year when large, decorated, unsettled cattle are deliberately brought onto residential streets, and a dog on a lead is the animal most likely to start something.
This is the half of the festival that pet advice ignores completely. On Mattu Pongal, the third day, the cattle are bathed, their horns are polished and painted in bright colours, garlands of flowers are placed around their necks, and they are taken for processions. Some owners decorate their cows with turmeric water and apply shikakai and kumkuma to their foreheads. In the Telugu states the equivalent day is Kanuma, which is dedicated to the cattle and other domestic animals, who are decorated, offered bananas and a special meal, and worshipped.
It is not confined to a procession route either. In Andhra Pradesh and Telangana the Gangireddula performers lead a decorated bull from door to door, wearing colourful turbans, blowing the boora and praising family lineages. Bulls adorned with bells and ornaments are a common sight at every doorstep from the start of Dhanurmasam, which is weeks before Sankranti day itself. Across the erstwhile East Godavari district alone, nearly 15,000 people belong to the Gangireddula community, organised under about 25 associations.
Why a decorated bull is not a calm bull
An animal that has been washed, painted, garlanded, fitted with bells and walked through unfamiliar streets amid drums and strangers is an animal under load. It is not aggressive and it is not dangerous by nature. It is simply working at the edge of what it can cope with, which is the state in which any large animal is least predictable. Your dog does not read that. Your dog reads a very large unfamiliar quadruped on its street and reacts.
A frightened or over-aroused dog lunging at a decorated bull outside a doorway is a bad outcome for everybody in the sequence. The bull is surrounded by people on foot. The handler has a rope, not brakes. Children are usually the closest humans. And the blame will land on the dog.
- Cross the road early, before your dog has fixed on the animal, rather than after.
- Keep the lead short and the dog on the side of you furthest from the cattle.
- Turn around and go home if the street is narrow. There is no version of this worth winning.
- Do not let a child hold the lead on Mattu Pongal or Kanuma, on any street, at any hour.
- Avoid routes with temples, cattle sheds or known Gangireddu rounds on those two days.
Fire and cattle together, in Karnataka
In parts of southern Karnataka the two hazards on this page meet. In the ritual called Kichchu Haisodu, farmers prepare dry hay stacks and ignite them, bulls are guided across the flames or embers first, and cows, buffaloes, calves and sometimes sheep follow, with owners often crossing alongside their animals. It is reported in the southern districts including Mysuru and Mandya, on the day of Sankranti.
If that happens on your lane, the correct position for a dog is indoors with the door shut. There is an open fire, a crowd, running livestock and shouting in the same twenty metres, and nothing a dog contributes to it ends well.
Jallikattu, kambala and bullock-cart races, stated factually
Bull events are lawful, scheduled, notified and locatable, which means a pet owner can find out in advance exactly where and when not to be.
Bonbeno takes no position on whether these events should happen. What matters here is only what they mean for somebody walking a dog in that district on that day, and for that the legal record is more useful than any opinion.
A five-judge Constitution Bench of the Supreme Court decided the question on 18 May 2023, in Animal Welfare Board of India and Others v. Union of India and Another. The Court held that jallikattu, kambala and bullock-cart race as introduced by the 2017 amendment Acts of Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Maharashtra have undergone substantial change in the manner they used to be practised, and dismissed all the writ petitions challenging them.
The Court was also explicit about the limits of its own finding. It recorded that it could not conclude that in the changed circumstances absolutely no pain or suffering would be inflicted upon the bulls while holding these sports, while being satisfied that a large part of the pain-inflicting practices of the pre-amendment period had been substantially diluted by the statutory instruments. We are quoting that because it is the Court's own wording, not because it settles the argument either way.
The detail that is actually useful to you
Read the definition rather than the headlines. The Tamil Nadu Amendment Act defines jallikattu as an event involving bulls conducted on such days from the months of January to May of a calendar year and in such places as may be notified by the State Government, and it includes manjuviratu, vadamadu and erudhuvidumvizha.
Three things follow from that single sentence, and none of them appear on the pages ranking for this query.
- The season runs five months, not one day. If you live in a jallikattu district, Pongal is the start of the window and not the whole of it.
- The days and places are notified in advance by the State Government, so the information exists and you can find it rather than guess at it.
- Kambala in Karnataka involves male buffaloes and bullock-cart racing in Maharashtra is also notified by day and place, so the same lookup works in those states.
In Assam the position on animal fights is different and recent. On 17 December 2024, in a petition brought by PETA India, the Gauhati High Court set aside and quashed the Assam notification of 27 December 2023 that had permitted buffalo fights and bulbuli bird fights, holding that these fights, irrespective of being long traditions practised in the State of Assam, cannot be permitted.
Find out whether an event is notified in your taluk or district this year, and if it is, keep your animal off those roads that day. The crowd, the vehicles, the loudspeakers and the running bulls are the hazard to a pet, and all four are avoidable with one search.
The food: til, gur, chikki, sugarcane and the Bhogi Pallu on the floor
Sankranti food is dangerous to a pet by composition and by position rather than by poison, and the two items that matter most are the ones nobody flags, which are whole sesame and sugarcane.
Start with what is actually in the box. Sesame and jaggery are the staples of the festival in every region that keeps it. Maharashtra exchanges tilgul, sweets made from sesame seeds and jaggery. Karnataka passes round ellu-bella, which is white sesame mixed with fried groundnuts, neatly cut dry coconut and finely cut jaggery. Punjab tosses sesame seeds, jaggery, sugar-candy, rewaries, peanuts and popcorn into the Lohri fire. None of these is chocolate, none contains xylitol, and the general toxicology of an Indian sweet box is already handled in full on our guide to Diwali sweets and your dog, which also covers the raisins and cashews that go into sakkarai pongal.
Sesame is a fat, and that is the whole point
Whole dried sesame seed is 49.7 g of total fat per 100 g, carrying 573 kcal per 100 g, with 17.7 g protein, 23.4 g carbohydrate and only 0.3 g of total sugars. Read that again. The seed is almost half fat by weight, and nearly all of the sweetness in a til laddoo comes from the jaggery rather than the til.
That reframes the whole question. Owners treat a til laddoo as a sugar problem and it is not one. It is a concentrated fat delivery, and the tablespoon of sesame that USDA weighs at 9 g is a rounding error compared with what is actually in a laddoo bound with ghee. Sesame is not toxic to dogs or cats. A fatty bolus eaten in one sitting is a different conversation, and it is a veterinary one.
| Item | What is in it | What it does to a dog or cat | What to do |
|---|---|---|---|
| Til laddoo, tilgul, gajak | Sesame at 49.7 per cent fat, bound with jaggery and often ghee | A dense fat load rather than a poisoning. Vomiting and loose stools at the mild end | Keep the plate above counter height, not on a low table |
| Ellu bella | Sesame, fried groundnuts, cut dry coconut, jaggery | Whole groundnuts and hard coconut pieces are a choke and obstruction shape as well as a fat load | Sweep after the exchange. It is handed round at child height and it scatters |
| Chikki | Groundnut or sesame set in hard jaggery | A hard slab that a dog swallows in pieces rather than chewing | Treat it like any hard confectionery and keep it off floors |
| Sugarcane stalks | Indigestible fibre, sold whole and chewed and spat out | Swallowed cane and bagasse is non-digestible plant material, the category that obstructs | Bin the chewed pieces immediately, indoors and outdoors |
| Bhogi Pallu | Regi pallu, which is jujube, plus sugarcane, flowers and coins, poured over children | Stones, coins and cut cane end up on the floor in one moment, in a room full of excited people | Shut the animal in another room for the ceremony, then sweep before letting it out |
| Sakkarai pongal | Rice boiled in milk and raw cane sugar, with coconut, ghee, cardamom, raisins and cashews | The raisins are the part that matters, and another page of ours covers that argument properly | Do not share it. Read our Diwali sweets guide before you decide otherwise |
Sugarcane is the item nobody warns about
Sugarcane is physically unlike anything else in an Indian pet's year. It is a long fibrous stalk that is given to children to chew, it is placed beside the pongal pot in the sun, it is part of the Bhogi Pallu, and the chewed remains are dropped on the floor and the street for four days. A gastrointestinal foreign body is a non-digestible object that gets stuck, and Cornell's canine health centre lists corn cobs among the common ones, alongside toys, socks, rocks and bones. The clinical signs are vomiting, loss of appetite, abdominal pain, diarrhoea, dehydration and lethargy, and such obstructions are emergencies often requiring surgical removal.
Cane bagasse belongs in exactly that category. It is cellulose, it does not break down, and a dog that swallows a length of it has not eaten a sweet, it has eaten an object. The sugar in sugarcane is not the problem and treating it as one is how this gets missed.
Repeated vomiting, refusing food, a tender belly or a dog that is suddenly flat and will not settle, after any day on which sugarcane, groundnut or a fatty sweet was within reach, is a reason to telephone a veterinary surgeon the same day rather than to wait and watch. Do not make an animal vomit at home. Bonbeno names no drug and no dose, because that is a decision made on the individual animal.
One separate item, briefly. The pongal pot is meant to boil over, and in many houses it does so on a stove set on the ground, outdoors, in the middle of a crowd. Hot milk and rice at floor level is a scald risk at exactly animal height. The same guide that covers burns covers that too. And if spices go into the pet's bowl along with the leftovers, our page on spices, salt and masala for pets already settles what each one does.
Kite string, drums and crowds, in one paragraph each
Three Sankranti hazards are real, well covered elsewhere on this site, and deliberately not repeated here.
Manja is the single most dangerous thing about this festival for an animal, and it has a page of its own that covers the two kinds of thread, the published injury counts, what the ban does and does not prohibit, and the first five minutes after a cut. Read manja and kite string injuries to animals before kite season starts, particularly if you are in Ahmedabad, Jaipur, Mumbai or anywhere else where Uttarayan fills the sky. Nothing on this page replaces it.
Noise is the second. Sankranti brings drums, loudspeakers, processions and, in several regions, crackers, and the behaviour side of that is settled material. How noise fear actually presents, what desensitisation and counter-conditioning require, what to put in a safe room and why comforting a frightened dog does not reinforce the fear are all on our guide to firecracker and noise fear in dogs. The nine-nights version of the same problem, and what repeated nights do that one night does not, is on the Durga Puja and Navratri page.
Crowds are the third. Processions, pandals, cockfighting grounds in coastal Andhra, and a house full of visitors all produce the same two outcomes, which are a frightened animal that bites because it cannot escape, and a front door held open while somebody carries in a tray. Check the collar tag and the microchip details in the first week of January, photograph your animal in good light, and decide now who owns the front door on the main day. If the worst happens, our guide to finding a lost pet in India is the one to open.
A free-ranging dog cannot avoid a bonfire route, cannot be led away from a decorated bull and cannot refuse a chewed sugarcane stalk on the road. Leave a covered parking area or stairwell open where you can, put out clean water, shift feeding to earlier in the day through the festival, and check under parked cars before starting the engine. Our guide to free-ranging dogs in India sets out the law and the civic position.
The four days, and which one carries which risk
Give each of the four days one job, because the hazards arrive in a fixed order and preparing for the wrong one on the wrong morning is the common failure.
The order is the same whether your household calls the days Bhogi, Thai Pongal, Mattu Pongal and Kaanum Pongal or Bhogi, Pedda Panduga, Kanuma and Mukkanuma. What changes is the name, not the shape.
| Day | What happens | The pet risk | The one job |
|---|---|---|---|
| The week before | Kites go up in the west, Gangireddu bulls begin their rounds in the Telugu states from Dhanurmasam | Fallen manja, and large animals arriving at the doorstep without warning | Check the collar tag and microchip, photograph your animal, and read the manja guide |
| Lohri evening, in the north | An open bonfire in the village square with food thrown into it and children going door to door | Open flame outdoors, roasting groundnut smells, crowds and an unsupervised fire afterwards | Keep the animal indoors from sunset and do not walk past the site that night |
| Day 1, Bhogi | Dawn bonfires of old possessions, with plastics and tyres patrolled against | A measured particulate spike that peaks at exactly dog-walking hour, plus smouldering debris after | Cancel the early walk. Keep windows shut until the smoke lifts |
| Day 2, Thai Pongal or Pedda Panduga | Cooking outdoors, the pot boiling over, sugarcane and sweets in every room | Scalds at floor level, chewed cane on the ground, fatty sweets within reach | Sweep after every course and keep the animal out of the cooking area |
| Day 3, Mattu Pongal or Kanuma | Cattle bathed, horns painted, garlanded and taken in processions; notified bull events in some districts | Large decorated animals on residential streets, crowds, and a dog that reacts to both | Change the route, shorten the walk, and never hand the lead to a child |
| Day 4, Kaanum Pongal or Mukkanuma | Family reunions and visiting | The front door opening repeatedly and food reaching the floor | Name one person who owns the door, and keep the animal in a closed room |
| The days after | Ash mounds, burnt wire, severed kite string in trees and on wires | Paw injuries, swallowed debris, cuts from string that outlasts the festival by months | Walk the route once without the dog, then check paws after every walk for a week |
Two of those days are the ones people get wrong. Bhogi is prepared for as though it were an evening, when it is a dawn event. And day three is treated as the quiet one, when it is the day the cattle are out.
What nobody counts, and what we could not verify
Four things are missing from this subject, and naming them is more useful than filling the gaps with a confident guess.
First, nobody counts pet injuries at Sankranti. We searched for an Indian veterinary caseload, a hospital series or a welfare organisation's tally of animals treated for burns, smoke exposure or obstruction across the festival, and found none outside the kite-string rescue counts that our manja page already uses. The published Indian work on Bhogi measures air, not animals. No page, including this one, can honestly give you an injury figure for pets at this festival.
Second, there is no study of what bonfire smoke does to a dog or a cat specifically. What is established is the general mechanism. Smoke contains a mixture of harmful gases, chemicals and superheated particles, inhalation causes generalised hypoxia and airway inflammation from impaired oxygen transport and utilisation as well as thermal and chemical injury in the airways, and immediate oxygen therapy is mandatory for all suspected smoke inhalation patients and should not be delayed pending diagnostic tests or because of a normal-looking oxygen saturation reading, which can be falsely elevated in carbon monoxide intoxication. That is a reference about structure fires. We are applying it to a street bonfire because it is the closest honest evidence, and we are telling you that rather than hiding it.
The measurements we wanted and could not get
Third, the Tamil Nadu Pollution Control Board's own Bhogi press releases are the right source for this page and we could not read them. The 2022 release at tnpcb.gov.in returned a scanned page image with no extractable text on this attempt, on 21 October 2026, and the site would not load through two other routes. Every Bhogi figure on this page therefore comes from two independent newspaper reports of the board's data rather than from the board's own document The Hindu Bureau. Treat that as one step removed.
Fourth, one figure in the 2026 report does not sit right and we are flagging it rather than repeating it. The article gives the pre-Bhogi PM10 range as 52-89 micrograms per cubic metre, which is the same pair of numbers it gives for the pre-Bhogi air quality index. Those are two different quantities and an identical range is more likely a transcription than a coincidence, so this page uses the Bhogi-day PM10 figure and the PM2.5 figures, which are internally distinct, and leaves the pre-Bhogi PM10 baseline out.
A single Indian veterinary hospital publishing its mid-January emergency caseload by cause, split by species, would be the most useful contribution anybody could make to this subject. One week of data from Chennai, Hyderabad or Mysuru would replace most of the reasoning above with measurement.
One closing note on the season rather than the week. Mid-January is winter across the north, and a Lohri bonfire exists because the night is cold. Cold-weather care is its own subject and we have not touched it here. Our guides to winter care for dogs in India cover the cold wave thresholds, the heating hazards and the shelter question, and they matter more in Punjab and Delhi in January than anything on this page does. In the humid coastal south the opposite problem applies, and a flat shut up against Bhogi smoke gets uncomfortable quickly, so work out before the morning which windows you will close and for how long.
Common questions
What should we not do on Sankranti?
With an animal in the house, do not take the usual dawn walk on Bhogi morning, do not walk a dog past decorated cattle or a bull event, do not leave til laddoo, chikki or chewed sugarcane within reach, and do not let a child hold the lead on Mattu Pongal or Kanuma. Check for fallen kite string before every walk through the whole kite season.
How harmful is bonfire smoke?
Bonfire smoke is harmful enough that India's pollution boards measure it. In Chennai on Bhogi day 2026, PM2.5 rose from a pre-festival range of 20-37 micrograms per cubic metre to 72-112, against a national twenty-four hour standard of 60, and every one of the fifteen city zones deteriorated. The continuous station at Perungudi recorded PM2.5 reaching 500 on Bhogi day 2024, which is what a one-morning peak looks like before it is averaged away.
Can dogs recover from smoke inhalation?
Yes, and the published veterinary position is that patients with mild clinical signs who respond well to initial stabilisation generally have a favourable prognosis, while those with severe signs or progression despite stabilisation may need more advanced or intensive care. Immediate oxygen therapy is mandatory for every suspected case and should not be delayed for test results or for a normal-looking oxygen saturation reading, which can read falsely high in carbon monoxide intoxication.
Is til safe for dogs?
Til is not toxic to dogs, and that is not the same as safe in a festival quantity. Whole dried sesame seed is 49.7 g of fat per 100 g and 573 kcal per 100 g, so a til laddoo is a concentrated fat delivery rather than a sugary snack, and it is usually bound with jaggery and ghee on top of that. Treat a sesame sweet as a fatty meal, not as a treat, and keep the plate off low tables.
What happens if a dog eats one sesame seed?
Nothing happens if a dog eats one sesame seed. Sesame carries no documented canine toxicosis, and a single seed is a rounding error against a dog of any size. The reason this question matters at Sankranti is scale rather than chemistry: a til laddoo, a slab of chikki or a handful of ellu bella delivers thousands of seeds at nearly half fat by weight, and that quantity can produce vomiting and loose stools at the mild end.
Can I give my dog sugarcane to chew?
No. Sugarcane fibre does not digest, and a swallowed length of cane or spat-out bagasse is a non-digestible object in the gut rather than a food. Gastrointestinal obstructions are emergencies that often require surgical removal, with vomiting, loss of appetite, abdominal pain, diarrhoea, dehydration and lethargy as the signs. The sugar is not the problem, which is exactly why this one gets missed during Pongal.
Is my dog safe around decorated cattle at Mattu Pongal or Kanuma?
Treat it as unsafe and change your route. On Mattu Pongal the cattle are bathed, their horns polished and painted, garlands placed around their necks and the animals taken in processions, and on Kanuma in the Telugu states cattle are decorated and worshipped. A bull that has been washed, belled and walked through drums and strangers is working at the edge of its tolerance, and a lunging dog on a short lead is the thing most likely to tip it.
Should I take my dog to a jallikattu, kambala or bullock-cart event?
No, and the useful point is that you can plan around it. Under the Tamil Nadu Amendment Act, jallikattu is conducted on days from January to May of a calendar year, in places notified by the State Government, which means the dates and locations are published in advance. Find out whether an event is notified in your district this year and keep your animal off those roads that day, because the crowd, the vehicles and the loudspeakers are hazards to a pet quite apart from the bulls.
Which Sankranti day is worst for a dog in my state?
It depends on which festival your street keeps, which is why one answer does not work. In Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana the worst morning is Bhogi, because of the dawn bonfires, with Mattu Pongal or Kanuma second because of the cattle. In Gujarat and Rajasthan the kite days are worst. In Punjab it is Lohri evening. In Karnataka, Kichchu Haisodu puts fire and livestock on the same lane on Sankranti day itself.