How can we help? An Article in the Tribune 04032007

[Guest guest]

All I am hearing is rumors and just as this article came out was written shouldn

't we all at AAPN and elsewhere start writing into Bangalore papers? Would that

be helpful or would foreign interference be unwise? At least AAPN India animal

groups should be writing letters into the Hindu, etc.? Here is the contact info

for the Hindu:

 

Send: Comments to: thehindu

Letters to the Editor to: letters with full postal address

 

I don't know the difference between comments and letters?

 

 

-

Dr.Sandeep Kumar Jain

capeindia ; aapn ; animalnet

Saturday, March 03, 2007 7:05 PM

An Article in the Tribune 04032007

 

 

Don't kill stray dogs

by Hiranmay Karlekar

The recent weeks have witnessed a controversy over the management of India's

stray or community dog population. Some have demanded that the Animal Birth

Control (ABC) (Dog) Rules 2001 should be revoked as these have had no effect.

Promulgated under the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act 1960, these provide

for picking up stray dogs, sterilising and vaccinating them against rabies, and

returning them to the places from which they had been picked up. The demand is

for the resumption of the pre-rules practice of municipal bodies killing stray

or community dogs en masse.

The ABC rules are in conformity with the " Guidelines for Dog Population

Management " published by the World Health Organisation (WHO) and World Society

for the Protection of Animals (WSPA) in 1990. Dr K. Bogel, Chief Veterinarian,

Public Health Unit, WHO in Switzerland, and John Hoyt, President WSPA (1986-92),

said in the document: " All too often, authorities confronted with the problems

caused by these (stray) dogs have turned to mass destruction in the hope of

finding a quick solution, only to discover that the destruction had to continue,

year after year with no end in sight " .

In its Eighth Report (WHO Technical Report Series 824), the WHO's Expert

Committee on Rabies, which met in Geneva in September 1991, referred to the

projects the organisation had coordinated in " in Ecuador, Sri Lanka, Nepal and

Tunisia, and other ecological studies conducted in South America and Asia " , and

added, " there is no evidence that the removal of dogs has ever had a significant

impact on dog population densities or the spread or rabies. The population

turnover of dogs may be so high that even the highest recorded removal rates

(about 15 per cent of the dog population) are easily compensated by survival

rates. " The WHO's Expert Consultation on Rabies, held in Geneva in October 2004,

reiterated this view (Technical Report Series 931).

India's experience endorses WHO's findings. J.F. Reece writes in his

contribution, " Dogs and Dog Control in Developing Countries " , in The State of

the Animals 2005 edited by Deborah J. Salem and Andrew N. Rowan, " In Delhi, a

concerted effort at dog removal killed a third of the straying dogs with no

reduction in dog population " . The experience of the days when mass killing was

in vogue, to which Dr Reece was referring, was the same everywhere in India.

In a recent paper, Dr Chinny Krishna, co-founder and currently the chairman of

the Blue Cross Society of India, cites the instance of Madras Corporation's

catch-and-kill programme that began in 1860. He quotes Dr Theodore Bhaskaran, a

former Post Master General of Madras, as stating in an article, " In the early

1970s, the number of stray dogs destroyed by the corporation was so high that

the Central Leather Institute, Madras, designed products-such as neckties and

wallets-from dog skins " . Dr Krishna has pointed out elsewhere that the number of

dogs killed by the corporation had gone up to 30,000 per year by 1995. Yet the

city's stray dog population and the incidence of human rabies continued to rise.

He has also stated that the Bangalore City Corporation's strategy of

electrocuting stray dogs to death and vaccinating pet dogs with neural issue

vaccine, implemented from 1936 to 1999, led to the slaughter of 25 million stray

dogs but the population of stray dogs, and the

number of dog bites and human rabies cases, continued to increase..

It has been the same experience everywhere. Dr Reece writes in the paper

mentioned above: " In Hong Kong, approximately 20,000 dogs were killed by the

government and another 13,000 by welfare organisations every year.with little

impact on the free-roaming dog population. In Ecuador, the elimination of 12-25

per cent of the dog population every year for five years did not reduce the dog

population (WHO 1988). In rural Australia, a 76 per cent reduction in the free

roaming dog population failed to drastically reduce their population, and the

number of free-roaming dogs returned to pre-cull levels within a year (Beck

2000). In Kathmandu, street dogs have been poisoned for at least 50 years with

little long-term effect on the population. "

On the other hand, the ABC programme has delivered wherever it has been

seriously implemented. In Chennai, the incidence of rabies declined from 120

in1996, the year of the programme's launching, to five in 2002. In Jaipur's

walled city, the number declined from 10 in 1999, the year of launching, to nil

in 2001 and 2002. In Kalimpong, the decline was from 10 in 2000 to nil in 2002.

Dog populations have also declined in numbers. Referring to the ABC programme's

implementation in Jaipur by the NGO Help in Suffering, J.F. Reece and S. K.

Chawla write in Veterinary Record, the prestigious journal of British Veterinary

Association (Volume 159, Issue 12), that during eight year's of implementation

the number of neighbourhood (read stray) dogs declined by 28 per cent between

the peak period and the time of the last survey.

A report in the Bangalore edition of The Hindu (Online) of April 3, 2006,

quotes animal rights activists in the city as claiming that the ABC programme

has reduced the number of stray dogs in the city from two lakh five years ago to

47,000.

The ABC programme takes time to show full results as the sterilised and

immunised dogs live for the rest of their lives. In their paper, " Rabies and

Rabies-Related Viruses: A modern perspective on an ancient disease " , Florence

Cliquet and E. Picard-Meyer, refer to the ABC programmes in India and observe

that, regularly conducted, " they should lead to a stabilisation of stray dog

population within five to seven years " .

The answer is compelling the authorities to implement the ABC programme

effectively and nationally, and not in mass killing. G.W. Beran states in " Urban

Rabies " in Natural History of Rabies (Ed. G.M. Baer) that in Ecuador, major

stray dog removal campaigns were followed by increase in the fecundity of

bitches and the survival of pups and an overall increase in the number of wild

animals.

Link: http://www.tribuneindia.com/2007/20070304/edit.htm#4

 

 

Dr.Sandeep K.Jain

 

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