(IN): Doggone menace

[Guest guest]

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Subverse/Doggone-menace/articleshow/4536706.c\

ms

 

Doggone menace

 

16 May 2009, 0000 hrs IST, BRINDLE

 

Woof! I'm Brindle, the street dog who adopted Bunnylady and Jugfellow some

years ago. The reason I'm writing this is because Jugfellow is too upset to

write his column himself. Why? Because, once again, some misguided residents

of the National Media Centre, the cooperative housing society near Gurgaon

where we live, have started off on the so-called 'stray dog menace'. This

happens with unfailing regularity, not just in the NMC but also in that

macrocosm of the NMC that we call India. From Kochi to Kolkata, Bagdogra to

Bangalore, someone or the other will bring up the stray dog menace, causing

a whole lot of innocent, perfectly harmless street dogs to be rounded up

and, more often than not, put to death in the most inhumane and cruel

manner.

 

People never seem to understand that the Indian street dog (please don't

call us strays) are hardy, intelligent, affectionate creatures, often much

more so that their pedigreed, imported counterparts, who have been viciously

inbred by exploitative breeders. Street dogs have to be all these things in

order to survive. Far from harming people, they are - when properly

vaccinated against rabies and other diseases - man's best pals, to coin a

phrase. They act as excellent guards for the neighbourhood, alerting

everyone to the intrusion of strangers by barking. Yet people keep on

wanting to get rid of them. Not realising that nature abhors a vacuum and if

you get rid of one lot of street dogs, another lot will inevitably take

their place.

 

There is no such thing as a 'stray dog menace'. There is only a 'stray human

menace'. Who is it that has strayed from the straight and narrow of God's

plan (and please don't tell me that God is dog spelt backwards, because if

i've heard that once i've heard it for the umpteenth time)?

 

Is it dogs, who live together amicably in the casteless, creedless democracy

of doggydom, who have strayed? Or is it humans, with their caste conflicts

and their religious wars, their whites and their blacks, their Hindus and

Muslims and Sikhs and Christians, their Maoists and their monarchists, their

Indias and their Pakistans, their terrorists and their victims, who are the

real strays? And the real menace. Not only to each other, but to all of the

rest of creation as well.

 

It wasn't dogs who created 9/11, and 26/11, and al-Qaeda, and the Sri Lankan

civil war, and the Taliban, and not one but two world wars. All these are

human creations. And what wondrous creations. Can you imagine a dog creative

enough to devise 65,000 nuclear warheads capable of killing every living

creature on this planet a hundred times over? No. Only humans are creative

enough to have done that. Though they have yet to prove themselves creative

and clever enough to find a cure for the common cold. Or AIDS, or cancer, or

a score of other killer diseases.

 

Humans have been too busy doing other things. Like polluting the planet and

destroying its environment. The world's forest cover has been thinned from

7.6 billion hectares in the pre-industrial age to 2.8 billion hectares. And

that's fast disappearing. Between 1700 and 1900, thanks to human activity,

more than 20,000 species

ofplants<http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Subverse/Doggone-menace/articleshow/\

4536706.cms#>,

593 species of birds, over 400 species of animals and 209 species of

amphibians became extinct. Today, humans wipe out one species every day on

an average. Tell me about the 'stray dog menace'.

 

Unlike humans, who think the universe and everything in it was created only

for their benefit to do with as they will, we dogs believe in the

co-fraternity of all living things. And that includes

cats<http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Subverse/Doggone-menace/articleshow/4536\

706.cms#>.

Cats? Oh, lor, what have Bunnylady and Jugfellow done? They've let Himal

into the place. And Himal is a cat! Who insists on literally rubbing

shoulders with me. Yuck. So, while there's no such thing as a stray dog

menace, if you were to talk about a stray cat menace, you might get me to

agree. Or maybe not. For the basic dharma that doggydom teaches is to live

and let live. Which means cats too. Where's that damn Himal gone to...?

 

http://blogs.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/jugglebandhi/

 

--

http://www.stopelephantpolo.com

http://www.freewebs.com/azamsiddiqui