Columnist calls for examination of Bangalore's dog problem

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Mindless killings

 

 

 

During the past several days Bangalore and Mysore have witnessed vicious

outbursts of orchestrated hysteria against stray dogs. Despite denials by

the municipal authorities, large numbers have been caught and killed

savagely. The incidents that sparked these off are doubtless tragic. Two

young children were reportedly mauled to death by stray dogs in Bangalore -

one on January 10 and another on March 1. In Mysore the killing, which began

on Sunday, March 4, followed the alleged attack on five children by a stray

dog.

 

While fully sympathising with the families of the two children in their

profound grief, one must recognise that they would have felt as intensely

had the two been run over and killed by a Karnataka State Transport

Corporation (KSTC) bus. In the past, such accidents have led to the torching

of buses and attacks on their drivers and conductors. But never have these

lead to hysterical mobs setting KSTC buses on fire, demanding the

destruction of all of them on the ground that they posed a threat to the

lives of all children. Nor have they gone on lynching sprees of transport

department personnel. And even if they had done, the State Government would

not have enthusiastically led them from the front.

 

Any explanation that KSTC buses do not pose any threat to children would

carry little conviction. A look at traffic accident statistics would show

that vehicular traffic on roads poses much greater a threat than stray dogs.

The difference in response clearly lies in the fact that the destruction of

all KSTC buses and lynching of transport department personnel would have

brought all human activity - commercial, industrial, governmental, social,

cultural and educational, to cite a few examples - to a standstill in the

State. This, in turn, would have led to a massive and violent public

backlash against the perpetrators. The killing of stray dogs, they were

convinced, was unlikely to cause any such thing.

 

Therefore, the question here is not what poses a greater threat to

children's lives but what one can do without upsetting one's life and what

one can get away with. One can argue that the lives of human beings are more

important than those of stray dogs.

 

The argument would have had a semblance of credibility if stray dogs as a

category threatened the lives of human beings as a category. They do not. On

the other hand, as a species their affection for - and loyalty to - human

beings have earned them the sobriquet of being " man's best friend " .

 

It is only a few dogs that bite, and that too mostly when provoked. One

can, of course, argue that the question of right and wrong is irrelevant:

Even one human life is more important than the lives of all stray dogs. We

enter a very difficult moral terrain here.

 

The argument that human life is more important than non-human life can lead

to a position where some humans can be described as sub-human and treated

like animals. In his incisive book, *Philosopher's Dog*, Raimond Gaita talks

of a woman grieving her son who had died recently. She says on watching on

television Vietnamese mothers grieving over their children killed in

American bombing, " It's different for them, they can just have more " .

 

Gaita also cites the instance of James Idsell, Protector of Aborigines

(indigenous people would be the right term, but one cannot change

designations) in western Australia, speaking similarly about indigenous

women whose children were taken from them. He quotes Idsell as saying " They

soon forget their offspring " and that he (Idsell) " would not hesitate for a

moment to separate any half-caste from its aboriginal mother, no matter how

frantic her momentary grief might be " .

 

In *The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany*,

William L Shirer writes, " The Jews and the Slavic people were the *

Untermenschen* - subhumans. To Hitler, they had no right to live, except as

some of them, among the Slavs, might be needed to toil in the fields and the

mines as slaves of their German masters " .

 

Shirer further writes, " By the end of September 1944, some seven hundred

and half million civilian foreigners were toiling for the Third Reich.

Nearly all of them had been rounded up by force, deported to Germany in

boxcars, usually without food or water or any sanitation facilities, and

there put to work in the factories, fields and mines. "

 

Apart from the moral, there is the practical aspect. The World Health

Organisation (WHO) has repeatedly made clear that stray dogs cannot be

eliminated from the streets through mass killing which has to be continued

endlessly without results.

 

Killings, scholars have found, destabilise a country's dog population and

increase the number of dog bites and the incidence of rabies. The Animal

Birth Control (ABC) programme under which dogs are neutered, immunised

against rabies and brought back to where they had been picked up from, is

the only solution.

 

Are those who are orchestrating the killing in Bangalore and Mysore trying

to scuttle the ABC programme in the cities? If so, then whose interest are

they serving? The argument that they are doing it out of ignorance and are

unaware of the WHO's findings, raises the question, why are the State

Government and municipal authorities siding with them? Surely, they cannot

be unaware of the facts!

 

This makes it imperative to ask whether the circumstances in which the two

fatal and five non-fatal attacks took place, have been thoroughly

investigated. Did the children throw stones at the dogs? Tease them? Or,

were they trying to snatch puppies from a bitch? Or, did someone unleash the

dogs on them? If the State Government is not utterly perverse, it would stop

the killing and order a judicial inquiry into the whole train of events.