Is the Stray Dog Menace Pushing India Into Medieval Ages?
There is hardly a city or township in India that is free from the menace of stray dogs. Can India meet the national plan to eliminate dog-mediated rabies by 2030?
Asensational video of a retired doctor being mauled to death by a pack of stray dogs at the Aligarh Muslim University campus has gone viral. It merely captures the ‘teeth’ of the iceberg. Dr Safdar Ali is not the first victim of canine predation.
No Indian town from Pathankot to Port Blair and Chandigarh to Coimbatore appears immune from stray dog menace. Gujarat High Court Acting Chief Justice AJ Desai, while hearing a PIL recently, admitted it was getting tough for many citizens to go on morning walks because of stray dogs.
On April 8, 58-year man Thakarashi Limbasiya was severely wounded in Rajkot, Gujarat, necessitating surgery. The Rajkot Municipal Corporation, which prides itself on successful sterilization of stray dogs, claimed only 2% of the population became victim of dog bite every year, which was “normal”. This, in the context of Rajkot, meant 9,900 victims of dog bites in 2022-23.
Such a standard of “normalcy” is sure to fail in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu where a survey recently found that the population of stray dogs has increased sharply from 46,292 in 2018 to 1,11,074 in 2022.
The widening scope of man-dog conflict means cruelty is not one-sided. On April 3, six stray dogs were found dead in Labour Colony under Chandrashekhpur Police station in Bhubaneswar, Odisha. They had allegedly been poisoned by the locals who were fed up with the dog menace and were devoid of the finer sensibilities of animal lovers.
Man-dog conflict burdens not only the healthcare system but also law enforcement agencies. In August 2022, Anuja Raman Chouhan, an animal lover in Bengaluru, lodged a complaint in Devenhalli Airport Police station alleging that out of 10 dogs she regularly fed for the past 18 months, two were poisoned and the rest eight were missing. The police are duty-bound to investigate such cases as under Section 11 (l) of Prevention of Cruelty of Animals Act, 1960 mutilation and killing of any animal (including stray dogs) by using strychnine injection in the heart or any other unnecessary cruel manner is a penal offence to be punished by monetary fine, or imprisonment as the case might be.
The state, however, reserves to itself the right to kill stray dogs, if the necessity arises. Destruction of stray dogs in lethal chambers or by other methods that involve minimum suffering is allowed under Section 3 (b) of the said statute. What constitutes “minimum suffering” might be subject to dispute.
Authorities have to resort to drastic measures as it was recently done in Begusarai district in Bihar to tackle a scourge of “man-eating dogs”. Begusarai district administration and Forest and Environment Department in Patna collaborated in the operation in January. A team of sharp shooters that arrived from Patna gunned down 30 ferocious stray dogs over two days.
In Ara, less than 200 km from Begusarai, people’s anger got the better of Municipal Corporation’s action. A dog that had bitten more than 100 people was lynched by an irate mob, shortly before the municipal corporation team arrived to capture it.
Dogs, according to a popular myth, do not harm infants. This view was recently rehashed by journalist and animal welfare activist Hiranmay Karlekar in his column in The Pioneer (Why do Street dogs bite? March 11, 2023). If only Hiranmay Karlekar, instead of quoting newspapers reports from 1996 and 2007, searched through Google News, he would have revised his views.
There have been several cases of attacks on babies and infants by packs of stray dogs across India. In Moradabad, a western Uttar Pradesh town notorious for canine terror, a one-and-a-half-year-old baby had to be referred to Delhi for treatment after she was grievously injured by a pack of stray dogs.
In a similar incident in January 2022, a pack of stray dogs had dragged and mauled a four-year-old girl in Bhopal, an incident captured on CCTV. A one-year-old baby boy in Noida Sector 100 died on October 18, 2022 after he was hospitalised after being mauled by a dog that had wandered into their apartment complex.
Panipat and Kurukshetra in Haryana have been witness to great battles in history. They are now stained by the blood of infants drawn by stray dogs. In June 2022, a new-born child was picked up from Panipat hospital by a pack of stray dogs before being chewed to death.
On the same day, a pack of stray dogs mauled to death a 10-year old boy in Charanthal village in Kurukshetra. Down south, in Hyderabad, a four-year-old child was mauled to death in Hyderabad a couple of months ago. More recently, a five-year-old child Bhanot Bharat was torn to death in stray dog attack in Khammam district of Telangana.
Meanwhile in February, a stray dog picked up and killed an infant sleeping next to his mother in a hospital in Sirohi district in Rajasthan.
A poor family, living in hutments near Vasant Kunj, lost its two children — Anand (7) and Aditya (5) — in two separate incidents of stray dog attacks in a span of mere two days.
Following these incidents, MCD Commissioner received summons from the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights. More recently, a six-year-old was dragged by a pack of stray dogs in Nagpur, but saved by timely intervention of his mother, as revealed in a shocking video that has surfaced. Thus, the assertion that dogs are protectors of infants is not necessarily true, but rather patently false in many cases. Should animal rights activism be founded on such unsubstantiated theories?
Strangely, no centralized data on dog bite is maintained in India, despite it being the biggest contributor of rabies infection. The National Centre for Disease Control (NCDC), under its Integrated Disease Surveillance Programme (IDSP), maintains consolidated figures of ‘animal bites’.
Perusal of a reply given by Purushottam Rupala, the Minister for Fisheries, Animal Husbandry and Dairying, in Rajya Sabha on March 24, 2023 (Unstarred Question 2822) shows that the annual animal bite figures are so fluctuating between 2019 and 2022 that they appear result of statistical manipulation than normal declining trend.
In a country where both human and dog populations are on the rise, and actual rabies deaths have declined only marginally in three decades, a decline in animal bites from 72.77 lakh in 2019 to 14.50 lakh appears rather unconvincing.
In 1979, the Janata Party government had adopted a new strategy to vaccinate dogs with canine anti-rabies vaccine. However, given the vast size of the country, disconnect between the agencies, and usual official corruption, its performance has been dissatisfactory.
In 1987, rabies was not known in Andaman & Nicobar. Today, however, Port Blair has become a haven of stray dogs threatening both local residents and tourists alike.
Decline in rabies deaths could be attributed to more improved treatment of patients and availability of anti-rabies serum. The rabies control efforts in India gained momentum during the 11th Five Year Plan (2007-2012) when the government approved a Pilot Project for the Control of Human Rabies.
The World Health Organization envisages reducing rabies deaths to zero by 2030. Prodded by global consensus, India has adopted National Action Plan for Dog Mediated Rabies Elimination from India by 2030. According to the Action Plan document, globally there are 59,000 human deaths annually due to dog-mediated rabies, and India contributes to one-third of total global burden due to rabies and two-third of rabies burden in the South East Asia region as per WHO-APCRI Survey in 2004.
While this implies that India has no independent enumeration of dog-mediated rabies deaths in the country, like no reliable data on dog bite itself, the nation is still far from achieving zero-rabies deaths by 2030.
Hope the authorities will not resort to statistical jugglery to achieve that end. If one third of global rabies deaths are in India, home to one-sixth of mankind, it implies rabies is punching above its weight in this part of the world.
Dog bite, whether or not the creature is rabid, is traumatic. Prophylactic doses have to be administered regardless of the transmission status. The probability of dog bite could not be reduced without controlling the stray canine population. Its onus is on the local bodies like municipalities/panchayat apparatus, which can involve NGOs if necessary.
No NGO, however, can indulge in unauthorized vaccination/sterilization of dogs. On March 10, 2023, the Union government notified the new Animal Birth Control Rules, 2023. Needless to say, these rules are aimed at dogs, which apart from a peripheral mention of cat is the only animal targeted.
The rules envisage the formation of a Central Animal Birth Control Monitoring and Coordination Committee for Dog Population Management and Rabies Eradication. There will be similar committees at the levels of the state/UTs. The responsibility of vaccination and sterilization of stray dogs belongs to the local authorities. The only facility that the citizens will get is an Animal Helpline, on which complaints about dog bites/rabid dogs could be lodged. This is not an insignificant facility.
Recently, when my brother-in-law suffered a stray dog bite for the second time within a year, in a relatively developed township of Bengal, we could not locate where to lodge a complaint about the apparently ‘rabid dog’. The Chandernagore Municipal Corporation said their dog-catching squad has been shut down (despite increase in canine population), whereas the Wildlife Department of West Bengal replied that dogs do not come under the ambit of their operation.
However, even under these new rules, it might be difficult to identify sterilized dogs. Dogs could be given identification collar only in the sterilization centre, and later on only a V-shaped mark is permitted on their right ear. No branding on the body is allowed. Things, thus, might fall between the two stools.
Even now there is a mismatch between local authorities’ claim of sterilization and actual instances when it comes to numbers. How can a local resident know which dog has been sterilized, and which one is not? Achieving a dog-mediated eabies-free India might be a tall order.
The writer is author of the book The Microphone Men: How Orators Created a Modern India (2019) and an independent researcher based in New Delhi. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not represent the stand of this publication.
Source- https://www.news18.com/opinion/opinion-is-the-stray-dog-menace-pushing-india-into-medieval-ages-7677307.html
