Savage Humans & Stray Dogs

[Guest guest]

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, December 2008:

 

 

Savage Humans & Stray Dogs

by Hiranmay Karlekar

Sage Publications (www.sagepublications.com), 2008.

275 pages, paperback.

 

 

Savage Humans & Stray Dogs author Hiranmay Karlekar has

reported about socio-political affairs and animal welfare for leading

Indian news media since 1963, writing in both English and Bengali.

As a columnist for The Pioneer, a nationally circulated newspaper,

Karlekar helped to curtail the dog pogroms that broke out in

Bangalore and elsewhere in Karnataka state after two children were

killed by dogs in early 2007. Karlekar is now a member of the Animal

Welfare Board of India.

Savage Humans & Stray Dogs opens with an attempt to provide a

definitive account of what actually happened in Bangalore. Karlekar

may not have seen the extensive ANIMAL PEOPLE coverage, but cites

many of the same sources, and appears to reach similar conclusions.

Both fatal maulings occurred in areas that were outside the

jurisdictions of the Animal Birth Control programs serving Bangalore.

Both occurred at sites where illegal butchering and disposal of meat

scraps caused dogs to congregate. Both fatalities were used by

political factions with a variety of motives, including affluent and

educated people who see street dogs as an affront to progress; poor

and illiterate people, who desperately fear rabies; ward bosses for

whom dog-catching is a traditional source of jobs to award as

patronage; and some Muslim leaders, since butchering in India is

work traditionally done mainly by Muslims.

First the fatalities were blamed on the persons governing and

administrating Bangalore. Those people sought to re-establish

primacy by killing dogs. Then competition to kill dogs spread--but

as it did, exposure of the mayhem brought a backlash. Killing dogs

did not prove to be so popular with most of the public as the initial

hue-and-cry had indicated it might be. The killing subsided, but

the Animal Birth Control programs in Bangalore had been crippled by

blame-throwing, remain underfunded, and have yet to recover lost

momentum.

Official attitudes remain ambivalent. The knowhow exists to

eradicate rabies and markedly reduce the dog populations of Bangalore

and Karnataka, but the will to allocate the needed resources is

lacking, amid all the other urgent needs of one of India's

fastest-developing regions.

Karlekar uses the Bangalore crisis as entry into an

exploration of human attitudes toward animals generally. He reviews

the status of animals in Vedic literature, Indian tradition, and

western culture and philosophy. Much of the latter two-thirds of

Savage Humans & Stray Dogs consists of summaries of others'

conclusions. Readers who are already familiar with animal rights

philosophy and scientific discoveries about animal intelligence and

emotions will find little new here, but most of Karlekar's audience

may not have previously encountered this material.

Karlekar's last chapter parallels the struggles for animal

rights and human rights. Karlekar discusses Nazism and the abolition

of slavery in the U.S., but makes little use of Indian examples.

Judeo-Christian and Islamic cultures, as Karlekar explains,

have usually drawn a clear line between the moral status of humans

and that of animals. Cultural relegation of some humans to the

status of animals have tended to fail--after long struggles--against

the reality that a person without rights fundamentally differs from

other people only in not having rights.

Hindu cultural attitudes toward human and animal rights are

considerably more complex. The caste system and the elevated status

at least nominally accorded to some animals have created a matrix

within which some animals may have had more rights and freedoms than

most people for most of recorded history. The mere fact of

personhood has not by itself conferred much status at all.

A further complication is that the Hindu belief in

reincarnation includes the idea that all humans have had many animal

existences, and may return to animal form.

Instead of trying to raise the status of oppressed Indians by

differentiating humans from animals, many of the most prominent

leaders of the Indian human rights struggle have sought to raise the

status of animals and oppressed humans together--among them Mohandas

Gandhi, Jawaharal Nehru, and Maneka Gandhi. Others, notably the

Communist factions influential in parts of India, have taken the

western approach, with much less success.

Meanwhile, economic development appears to be raising the

status of the poorest Indians more than any brand of activism.

Whether economic development means a net reduction in animal

suffering remains to be seen, with Indian meat consumption rapidly

rising on the one hand, while animal advocacy proliferates on the

other. Perhaps western cultural influence will at last draw a hard

line between the status of humans and the status of animals in India.

But again, as Karlekar speculates, perhaps the backlash that

stopped the dog pogrom in Bangalore hinted that most Indians don't

feel the need to draw such a line, especially if they see the

consequences. --Merritt Clifton.

 

 

 

--

Merritt Clifton

Editor, ANIMAL PEOPLE

P.O. Box 960

Clinton, WA 98236

 

Telephone: 360-579-2505

Fax: 360-579-2575

E-mail: anmlpepl

Web: www.animalpeoplenews.org

 

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