Now and then, stray dogs tear a child apart. Old people too. This is rare. But they do kill thousands of Indians every year in a less dramatic way, through rabies, and dozens of other diseases. The World Health Organization speculates the figure could be 20,000. Of these, “30% to 60%” are children under the age of 15. Most of them must be poor because if this had happened to middle-class people or the rich, India would have probably exterminated stray dogs by now. Lakhs of Indians are bitten every year; innumerable motorcyclists fall when they are chased by dogs.
Yet, in dealing with stray dogs, India has among the most compassionate regimes in the world. Some of the laws that protect homeless dogs are so thoughtful that it would appear a stray dog has infiltrated law-making. In India, public spaces and private colonies are territories of stray dogs. If a dog mauls and kills a child, the dog would be taken away for a few days and observed. If it does not appear aggressive, it would be returned to the very place it had attacked the child. And people cannot be stopped from feeding it.
This is confusing because except for animal rights, in all other aspects, India has evolved into a practical unsophisticated middle-class nation that has no patience for esoteric liberal values like ‘free speech’ or ‘privacy.’ The fount of liberal sophistication, the West, has long got rid of its stray dog problem chiefly by killing them. Yet, a small group of global animal lovers has managed to pressure India into enacting sophisticated laws that favour dogs over the human poor.
Stray dogs are an easy civic problem to solve, and very difficult moral problem. People who claim to love them should be asked to do more than attach a collar on them, or feed them on the roads. They should take them home. The other solution is euthanizing them. But even people who suggest this when they chat with me refuse to be quoted.
Ryan Lobo is a wildlife filmmaker and a moderate lover of dogs, but does not imagine dogs are his children. Nevertheless, he cannot help but see something of a child in a canine. He is among the activists who are fighting animal lovers in courts and in the media. He says India’s protection of stray dogs is bad for Indians and stray dogs. Lobo says there are probably 80 million stray dogs in India, and they have to be removed from public spaces. He says sterilization does not work. “It’s a well-known fact globally that sterilization as a population control measure is meant for owned dogs. It’s not meant for free-ranging stray dogs.” Apart from the fact that it is ineffective, the other problem is that it does not make dogs go away. “The effects remain. So a sterilized dog can still bite you and it can still pick up any of 40 or 50 diseases and transmit them. And statistically, or you could say logistically, it’s not possible to vaccinate 60-80 million dogs a year without abysmal failure, which is what we see.”
Do humans have a primary right over their environment? I have no moral answer to this question. However, there is a practical answer. Almost every aspect of human life is based on the natural instinct of any species to exert control over its environment. Seen that way, yes, like any animal, we have a primary right over our environment. But then the human instinct of compassion has saved millions of human lives and given purpose to a civilization that otherwise has no meaning. So, maybe putting up with harmful animals is a price we pay for being beneficiaries of compassion. Even so, India’s decision to sacrifice human welfare, especially of the poor who are forced to share the immediate environment with stray dogs, is not a carefully calculated moral position. It is mostly moral laziness and the feudal triumph of a section of the middle-class that has devised a moral camouflage to justify its love for dogs above humans.
Also, India’s dog laws are the triumph of evolution’s investment in cuteness. “Dogs have adapted,” Lobo says, “to gel with human beings. So, you know, the eye movement, the muscles around the eyes in dogs are very highly developed. They’re very different from wolves, which don’t have the same muscles. So, when you look at a dog, the dog raises its eyebrows.” Also, dogs have realized it is profitable to “mimic an infant.”
For the violence of stray dogs, animal lovers fault human behaviour. They say the mannerisms of people provoke dogs. Don’t get nervous, they say, and dogs won’t bite you. This is partly true, partly false and partly also daft.
Some people are naturally very comfortable around stray dogs, and some just cannot be so relaxed. It is similar to how some people are not scared of snakes while most are. Also, the behaviour of stray dogs depends on circumstance. They can seem endearing when you are in a car, or in other safe enclaves of Indian life. But when you are on a cycle or motorcycle, or running down desolate stretches, there is a very real risk of being bitten no matter what lovely sounds you generate. On Goa’s beaches, there are packs of as many as 30 dogs. At around six in the morning, there would be no one around you for miles, just packs of dogs. Sometimes they come charging. Mostly, they just want to play. Or they themselves don’t know what they want.
As with people, there is a tiring ordinariness to the sweetness of stray dogs. They are quite lovely to those over whom they have no power, and dangerous to the vulnerable, like little children, or even an adult who is far outnumbered.
