Those living in India now, specifically Tamilnadu, must have heard about the latest issue we face- what the media has termed ‘The street dog menace’. We are being bombarded in the media with this news. Every day, the same videos are being shown. The Supreme court has issued a statement saying that those who feed street dogs should be held responsible for the dogs that attack people. Public fury is being whipped up. The steam is rising. The boiling point is fast approaching. Like in Kerala, where in the recent past, men in groups went around hanging street dogs from trees and beating them to death with sticks, people are being triggered. We all know where this is heading.
I have a lot to say. Let me say it. Listen, please. Even though it is futile, even though it will make no difference, I want to speak. I want to scream, actually, but I will settle for speaking. More than 2500 words are in this post. I have warned you. Read it all, if you can.
1) This Government is too corrupt. The disease is bone deep and I do not see how it possibly be removed. Human rights are being violated unchecked. Animals, who are an afterthought, have no hope in this atmosphere of putrid hate.
Money. The money that we need to fix this country is in the hands of politicians and celebrities. The staggering amount of money that is in the hands of the few cannot even be imagined. Crores of crores. And what is available is being spent in ways that boggle the mind. A statue that costs 300 crores. Run that amount in your mind and look around you at the filth on the streets. At the way our people live in slums. At the animals that are diseased and rotting on the streets.
Compassion is the privilege of those who are well fed and satisfied. And yet, miraculously, compassion exists in the lowest members of the social ladder. Open Instagram and see the homeless, the beggars on the streets who part with their food to feed street dogs. How many watchmen in India keep a biscuit packet in their pockets? How many poor women who run food messes feed street dogs with leftover food? How many butchers go around in the morning with a bucket of rice cooked with offal meat and bones? I have met these people and talked to them. I do the same whenever I can.
This truly is the Kali Yuga, the epoch of unchecked degradation of the human soul outlined in Hindu scripture. Why else would compassion be punished to this extent? Those who feed dogs should be held responsible, is it? Let’s look at some facts-
Cost of vaccination per dog: Rabies Rs.200 and Paro Rs.600 totalling Rs.800 approximately.
Cost of neutering a male dog: Rs.500 and a spaying a female dog: Rs.750 at the Government Veterinary hospital. Privately neutering and spaying will cost double or triple those amounts.
For the most part, the people who feed street dogs are not rich. What they do is already beyond their means. To ask them to vaccinate, neuter and take up medical treatment for street dogs is unthinkable. What the Supreme Court has done with their statement is frightened these people and perhaps even intimidated a few into stopping. How is that a solution? If you give ten rupees to an old beggar, do you think you should be asked to take him or her to a hospital and get them treated and provide for them? Don’t you want to just give them what you can and move away from them and forget their existence? Isn’t your compassion limited? That is your right. No one can ask more from you. And yet, people are applauding the Supreme Court’s statement. Everyone needs someone to point at, someone to make a villain of, someone to take the responsibility. Let’s talk about responsibility in depth.
2) Do you know that your local corporation has a responsibility to neuter and spay street dogs every day? They receive funds for it. There are countless Government veterinary doctors who ready to do ten operations per day per doctor. They are good people. I have talked to them. And yet, what is being done? A few street dogs are being captured and photographed. There are either released again or mostly, killed. However, their photographs are being sent to the head office saying that their operations have been performed and the funds are collected and pocketed. Do I have proof for this? Excuse me while I laugh hysterically. How do you get proof for the corruption happening in this country? Sometimes, once in a blue moon, a few dozen street dogs actually are neutered and released. The number is proudly published in the newspapers. It makes no difference- in the next mating season, the dogs more than compensate for it. So that’s how the Government executes its responsibility. Let’s move on to human beings in general.
3) I am appalled by the violence of the response against street dogs. Why this fury against animals who have a limited intelligence? It doesn’t come forth against members of our own species who are vastly superior in intelligence and morals. If you pulled up the statistics on how many women and children are being raped in a minute and how many people are being attacked by dogs in a minute across the world, which statistic do you think would be higher? And yet we don’t see any calls for men as a sub-species to be held responsible for the crime? In fact, when the ‘Me too’ movement was at its peak, there were men who were audacious enough to start a hashtag saying ‘Not all men’. It made the blood boil. If you are a man reading this, imagine what your life would be like if you knew there was a serial killer in your neighbourhood targeting men of your age group. Imagine what every day would be like, what all precautions you would take and how much it would influence your every single plan. That’s what it’s like for women from the moment we are old enough to go to the neighbourhood store till the day we die. One serial killer is enough. One rapist is enough. Life cannot be the same.
The point of this is that we are speciest. We pride ourselves on not being racist or casteist or sexist, but speciesm isn’t a trending fad yet. I hope it will become one, because only then will we stop the wholesale crimes we commit against other species without conscience or fear of punishment. Until then, we as a species are morally reprehensible. We ought to be ashamed of ourselves. We have single-handedly caused the extinction of complete species’ of animals and we continue to do so. And how do we respond to animals that are less intelligent than us who we see as a threat- just kill them. It’s easier. There’s no one to question us.
4) There’s no one to question us. That’s the greatest irony, isn’t it? Without thousands of religions on this planet with any number of deities, we still have no one to question us. I dropped off a friend at her home yesterday and her mother came out to speak to me. A devout Hindu woman if there ever was one. Starts the day with a bath and a complete set of rituals done before an array of gods in her pooja room. She talked to me proudly about her watchman who keeps a big pile of stones on the compound wall and makes sure not a single street dog even thinks about walking in front of their house. This way she does not have to be offended by the sight of dog poop anywhere near her house. She told me proudly about her cousin who walks the streets with a taser rod to attack any dogs that comes near him. Funny how her Gods have taught her more about hygiene than compassion.
And yet, she runs to the gate when a cow comes along, so that she can feed it a banana and touch its head. It can definitely poop in front of her gate because its poop is holy. Does she know that 99% of male calves end up on a butcher’s block? She does. Only the females, i.e. the cows have been lucky enough to be singled out by God. Sometimes, I wonder, if I had to explain all this to an alien, what would I say? How would I even approach this hypocrisy?
5) Recently, I read a post in which there was this question- if a wild tiger or lion was roaming the streets, would you feel safe and say, let it roam? The implication being that street dogs are the same since they attack people. So they should be dealt with. Let me answer that question. No, as an animal lover, I wouldn’t want wild animals roaming the streets. I would want it to be humanely captured and released into a sanctuary or reserve.
But the thing is- dogs are not wild animals. We have a responsibility towards them that we do not have toward any other creature on earth. Tens of thousands of years ago, our ancestors domesticated a particular species of wild animals and brought them into their lives as companions. Through the years, those majestic animals have been bred and interbred to create the helpess dogs that we see today. These animals have zero capacity to exist in the wild. They have very little in common with their own ancestors. They have been bred to become creatures who are solely dependent on humans for survival. Street dogs exist on the kindness of some humans and the trash piles of all humans. This is the crime that we have committed against them.
In the recent past, the death of a British monarch caused the internet to explode in a frenzy of memes and posts. We got to see how much anger and resentment lives in the hearts of those countries that were former colonies. We want the British to acknowledge their brutal past and answer for their ancestors. We want reparations. Let’s acknowledge that what we have done to dogs is our responsibility. We answer for our ancestors and we owe these animals reparations. We owe them homes with food and safety, so that they don’t live on the streets, and they don’t become so desperate and beastly that they attack people.
Let me emphasize this fact- as a species, we have a socio-moral responsibility to street dogs. We created them. In that context, we are the Gods. What Gods we are!
6) Let us not close our eyes to what we are. Animals are being abused every day. I won’t go into those horrors here. I don’t have the courage to type all that. Go to Bangalore. Slow down as you near the city. You will see at least one Golden Retriever or Labrador on the highway that has become old, so their rich owners have abandoned them on the outskirts of the city. It’s happening more often than you think. Look closely at the packs of street dogs. You’ll soon see that one of them at least is a dog that has been abandoned. At the rate street dogs are reproducing, people are actually adding to their numbers by abandoning animals that have no street sense. Imagine the fear and hunger and helplessness those pets must feel. Imagine your little child suddenly ripped from its home and standing in the middle of some street somewhere. Close your eyes and feel it. Even if it makes you uncomfortable, open your heart and feel it. Do you think these animals chose this existence? That they want to live in such misery? That they want to go mad and attack people. What choice is open to them?
I have adopted 7 dogs from the streets. I don’t have the money or physical strength to do more. Even though there are a few hundreds like me, we are not enough. What we do is not enough. On a daily basis, my heart hurts that I cannot save them all.
I have friends. They don’t love dogs. But I know that they are kind people. When I tell them about street dogs, which is very rare, they express their pity. But that’s where it stops. I don’t blame them. Not everyone can take up every cause. Not everyone can be an activist. We all struggle, we all have lives. But, it pains me that people are unaware of so many things. Even those that are educated and well-off have no clue. The media that shows a video of street dogs chasing a man does not reveal everything else that I have typed in this post, does it? Furious anger is being whipped up. Compassion is being suppressed. Politics ensures people are kept poor and angry. That way, everything the Government says is seen as true, and people become puppets. Most of us know this. Yet, we have become so passive and submissive, that we would rather not think about it. Life is difficult enough as it is. Why open our eyes too wide and see what we don’t want to see. But we cannot afford to live like this, not for long.
7) What is the solution? There are two choices- kill them or adopt them. The Government will do nothing. They have started propaganda to ensure people support whatever drastic measures they are going to take. The media is their tool, as always. Public sentiment is being turned against animal lovers and street dogs. I am guessing that soon, we will see a wholesale capture and killing of street dogs across the country.
The solution lies only with people. Awareness and compassion. Instead of fearing these animals, feed them. Their instinct is to be friendly with and love humans. Everyone just needs to feed them. Earn their love. Keep their bellies full. What possible reason could they have to attack if they are fed and treated with kindness? Except for the occasional stray that contracts rabies and attacks- those ones should be captured and euthanized, yes. There is no other choice. Every neighborhood has hundreds of people. Start a collection of funds. Give it to the one or two animal lovers in the area who are more than willing to spend their time and energy to get street dogs neutered and vaccinated. All we need is money and a maybe a little help with transport.
The solution lies with people. Stop being angry with animals that don’t know better. Stop being angry with people are trying to help. Awareness and compassion. Awareness and compassion. Awareness and compassion. I beg of you.
………Even as I write this, I know it won’t happen. We are too selfish to do this, and it is too much to ask. Compassion is costly, in too many ways. Violence is cheaper, faster and more effective. Personal responsibility is too scary to think about because it’s too much work. My heart bleeds for the violence that is to come. I am already tearing up at the injustice that millions of animals are going to face, that are going to be punished for the actions of the few. If there is a God, I only ask one thing- do better next time, God. Wipe my species off the face of this overwhelmed and struggling planet and do better next time.
