Heard of ~ Cynophobia ! Dogs are considered man’s best
ally and among the most sought after pets ~ to some they bring endless joy and
fun. For some they are too scary…. One shudders to think of walking alone in
by-lanes especially in the night time, when suddenly a stray dog starts
barking, making a few more join and perhaps giving a chase…..too scary…
Recently a public interest litigation was filed at the Madras High Court Bench in Madurai seeking to control
the stray dog menace in the city. The petitioner pleads for direction to
authorities to administer “fatal
injection” to the dogs afflicted by rabies in order to control the dog menace. There 2 women died in successive days due to
rabies’ infection. In Chennai there were news of a 4 year old and another 5
year old girls becoming victims of stray dog menace in Washermanpet. Another was attacked by her neighbour’s dog
within RK Nagar police limits.
TOI reports that Chennai Corporation has revealed before
the Madras High Court that it killed a total of 779 stray dogs in 2012. Terming
it euthanasia, the civic body admitted that it put to death 4,406 dogs in a
three-year period beginning April 2009. It was the civic body’s reply to a
public interest writ petition seeking a direction to the authorities to curb
the stray cattle menace on Chennai roads. The PIL-petitioner wanted the
authorities to take action against owners of animals that loiter on streets
without licence or regulation. Noting that they are a hazard to public safety,
he wanted the corporation to remove the stray animals under Sections 280 and
281 of the Chennai City Municipal Corporation Act. According to statistics submitted by
Corporation, in 2012, they captured 19,131 dogs, of which 779 were euthanised
and the remaining 18,352 sterilised.
I am no great fan of dogs ~ do not suffer from ‘cynophobia’ though… Cynophobia is the abnormal fear of dogs.
It is classified as a specific phobia, under the subtype "animal
phobias”. This article in The Hindu by
Maneka Gandhi stating ‘it is dangerous to think cities are built only for people’ makes
a very interesting reading and provides another perspective to the mongreldom.
**********************
Article by Maneka
Gandhi…
The Mayor of Chennai has been making a
lot of noise about removing dogs from the street and putting them in permanent
pounds. One does not have to be a dog lover to realise how dangerous this is to
the wellbeing of Chennai’s humans. Let me explain.The first letter I ever wrote
as an animal welfare activist was in the 1980s to the Municipal Commissioner of
the New Delhi Corporation asking him not to kill dogs cruelly. It did not occur
to me that there could be a world in which dogs were not killed at all.
In 1995, I went to the U.S. for a
major conference on the subject of killing street dogs. A county called San Mateo in California
had replaced the killing with sterilisation and vaccination and, within two
years, had so much scientific evidence that this worked. In 1980, there was a
survey of dog numbers in Delhi;
the figure arrived at was 1.5 lakhs. From 1980 to 1990, about 800,000 dogs were
killed. So what was the number of dogs in 1990? The same 1.5 lakhs! Killing
them — by picking up the dogs with tongs, breaking their limbs, keeping them
hungry for a week, stuffed 30 to a cage lying in their own faeces and urine,
throwing water on them and then electrocuting them — had no effect on the
numbers.
I asked the World Health Organisation
if there were any alternatives. There were. I came back, filed a case against
the killing of dogs in Delhi
and won. The typical bureaucrat/lower politician’s attitude — “Do you want
people to live or animals? Cities are built for people, not animals.” — is
outdated and unscientific.
Nature has allotted to the dog the
role of a scavenger of the city. Its specific purpose is to keep garbage, rats
and other pests in check. Do you think that dogs survive because animal lovers
feed them? Certainly not. One pair of rats is ready for breeding within six
weeks of being born — and each pair can breed 35,000 rats by the end of each
year. Who keeps this potentially disastrous situation in check? No municipal
corporation has allocated a single paisa for the destruction of rats. Each city
has over 10,000 cases yearly of humans bitten by rats. Is there any municipal
money allocated for rat elimination? No. Instead, the Corporation removes the
rat eliminators: the dogs.
And which dogs? Sick dogs? Rabid dogs?
No. The Class IV catchers are not going to risk their lives by catching dogs
with a communicable disease. They catch only healthy, happy dogs that are owned
or fed by people working as servants, dhobis, small hawkers or shopkeepers who
feed them but have no space to keep them. The sick dogs, the dangerous dogs —
these are the ones that survived and went on to breed.
Wolf packs decide, on the basis of
available food , what each pack’s optimum size will be. For instance, if there
is only so much game in an area, the pack limits its numbers. The dog too
follows a similar pattern. It is as if the dogs decide a city’s food capacity is
and then stay at a certain number — no matter how many we remove.
Now let us come to rabies. The
standard justification for killing is that stray dogs cause rabies. In Delhi, 585,192 dogs were
killed but the rabies rate continues to climb. Why? For one thing, government
records show (in a report published by the Rabies Control Programme) that 70
per cent of the people suffering from rabies had been bitten by pet dogs — not
strays.
What did the administration of Delhi think of its own
killing programmes? In a secret report circulated to the Delhi administration,
the Manager of the Slaughter House (TU) MCD, stated that in regard to the money
being allocated in 1991-92 for the ‘rabies control programme’ the
indiscriminate killing of stray dogs serves ‘no purpose whatsoever.’
The Report stated that as soon as the
stray dogs of one area were killed, their space was filled by an equal number
from another area. It recommended that the Municipal Corporation of Delhi
constitute a unit in every zone to maintain a record of the dog population in
the zone and that each dog should be brought to one spot and set free after
being sterilised and immunised with the anti-rabies vaccine. The Report
stressed repeatedly that this is the only way to reduce both rabies and the dog
population of the city.
During my 1995 trip to Chennai, it
took me 45 minutes to make a presentation to the CM and the officials. They
understood immediately and the killing was stopped. The dog-killing pound was
given to an NGO and the ABC programme started. This was the first city in India to do
this. The Government of India came to the same conclusion in 2001, after many
cities started this programme on their own. Jaipur was first to declare
zero-rabies incidence. This programme has been repeatedly challenged in court —
and each time the judges have seen the sense of the animal birth control
programme and the sense of having the dogs back on the street after their
operations.
Now we come to bites. Sterilised dogs
do NOT bite. Sterilisation removes the testosterone from the male and all
sexual incentive to fight. Cities that have employed sterilisation have shown a
steep decrease in the number of bites. What continues to increase the
statistics are bites from unsterilised pet dogs, which account for 95 per cent
of all dog bites
Now let us come to the Mayor of
Chennai and his plan for dog pounds. Let’s look at this programme:
1. Will the pounds be able to hold
dogs indefinitely? Can you put five dogs in your house, feed them well and
expect them not to fight ? No. The dog is a territorial animal. In a stressful
situation he will fight. If, God forbid, animals escape from there, they will
be wild and angry.
2. What will it cost Chennai? The cost
would be over 100 times that of sterilisation. Feeding the dogs and paying the
staff will mean a minimum of Rs. 50,000 a day. More would be needed to pay
doctors and organise housing during the rains. Do you want to pay for this?
3. Will the dogs disappear from the
streets? They won’t. A large number of the dogs that the Mayor proposes to
impound are sterilised. When they are removed, unsterilised dogs from the
hinterlands will pour in. So Chennai will go back to its pre-sterilisation
days. The new dogs will bite, they will carry rabies.
4. What will happen in Chennai? More
citizens will be bitten. There is now zero rabies in Chennai. It will come
back. And rats will come back in millions. Rats are not scared of humans. They
have two predators: dogs and cats. Remove the dogs, as the Mayor and Collector
did in Surat,
and the rats will swarm into the city with their diseases. Do you want to be
menaced with rat bites and plague? And pay for dogs to loll around in
government pounds while you run for your lives?
5. What is the alternative? Restart
the sterilisation programme. The Chennai Corporation has left the job of
sterilisation to two small NGOs — Blue Cross and People for Animals — and
neither has the money to cover the whole city. You do not have to be an animal
lover to understand the fraud being perpetrated and what will befall the city
of Chennai once the Mayor gets his own way.In
the first case against the killing of dogs in India, the judge observed: “It
needs no great learning to appreciate that dogs or animals are not encroachers
on earth. There is no question of eliminating them.
Wolf packs decide, on the basis of
food available to them, what each pack’s optimum size would be. The dog too
follows a similar pattern. It is as if the dogs of a city decide what the food
capacity of that city is and then stay at a certain number — no matter how many
we remove.
