Seventeen days of running between hospitals could not save Simon Kandulna. Bitten by a stray dog at a construction site in Bhopal, the four-year-old succumbed to rabies on Jan 22.
In the period little Simon fought that grim battle, a street dog bit 13 people at Guduvanchery, a Chennai suburb, a stray mauled a toddler at Moosapet in Hyderabad, students at IIT-Roorkee demonstrated against frequent dog bites on campus, a community dog that bit four people in Kanpur was beaten to death, six puppies were killed in Delhi’s Mayur Vihar, a family that feeds dogs was attacked in Bhopal, and the Supreme Court listed for final hearing in February petitions to curb stray dog attacks.
Read further back and this news cycle repeats itself. It could be Noida, where residents of a condominium set up a patrol to watch out for dogs; Pune, where a cop beats up a woman who ensures dogs don’t go hungry; Bengaluru, where the carcasses of seven strays, likely poisoned, are found. We could go on.
What this shows is how deep Indian society finds itself embroiled in a worsening strife about a problem that is not its creation – crores of community dogs in our streets and public places that has put the strays at the heart of the most common, and complex, of human-animal conflicts, divided people into two bellicose camps of “dog lovers” and “dog haters”, and is triggering completely avoidable consequences for public health, besides endangering the ‘best friend’ relationship between the two species.
Don’t point the finger at “dog lovers” or “dog haters”, and certainly not at the dogs. Our stray dog problem is the result of a collective municipal lapse that cuts across states, a failure to properly sterilise and vaccinate community dogs or implement the animal birth control (ABC) programme.
There is no organised data on the number of stray dogs in India today. The closest we have to an estimate is the State of Pet Homelessness Report published in 2021, which put the number at 6.2 crore. This is three times the population of Mumbai today and twice that of Delhi. The 20th Livestock Census report published in 2019 had pegged the number of stray dogs at 1.53 crore, with seven states recording a population above 10 lakh.
Last year, according to ministry of health and family welfare data, Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu reported more than 4 lakh cases of dog bite each. Gujarat, Bihar, UP and Karnataka followed, in the 2-2.5 lakh range. In September last year, a lawyer turning up at the Supreme Court with a bandaged arm after he was attacked by strays prompted an impromptu discussion on the problem before Chief Justice DY Chandrachud, with solicitor-general Tushar Mehta, the country’s top law officer, referring to a boy’s death from rabies in Ghaziabad.
Still, bites are extreme examples. Most dogs don’t bite.
But they do bark. And in thousands of Indian neighbourhoods, that extracts a silent cost – on sleep. Payel, a dance teacher who lives in a ground-floor apartment at Dum Dum in Kolkata, often moves to her living room in the middle of the night. “My bedroom window faces the street. The dogs gather and start barking, sometimes for hours together. It affects my sleep. The dogs otherwise are totally harmless,” she says.
Barking, and chasing, are the most common manifestations of the stray dog problem.
:max_bytes(150000):strip_icc():focal(801x314:803x316)/adopted-dog-2083c26a849a4d56b915a236213a9603.jpg "Allergic Man Tells Girlfriend to Get Rid of Dog She Adopted During Their Breakup")
