Animal Birth Control gains speed

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 2009:

 

 

 

Animal Birth Control gains speed

 

 

CHENNAI, DELHI, MUMBAI --Indian minister of state for

environment and forests Jairam Ramesh served notice in July and

August 2009 speaking appearances that he means to put wheels under

the Indian national Animal Birth Control program.

Now Chinny Krishna, who engin-eered the ABC program, needs

to put new wheels under the Blue Cross of India surgical team to keep

up with increasing demands for service. " We have been inundated with

requests from municipalities asking us to undertake ABC, " Krishna

told ANIMAL PEOPLE. " In addition to the cost of doing more

operations, we are handicapped for want of enough vehicles, since

all these new areas are some distance from Chennai, " where the Blue

Cross of India is based.

" Each vehicle costs approximately $21,000, " Krishna said,

" and we need at least two most urgently. We applied to the Animal

Welfare Board of India for an additional vehicle over a year ago.

Our mobile surgery bus is 13 years old and we are using it to pick up

and drop off dogs for ABC. Our newest vehicle, of seven, is

almost five years old. They have all covered well over 100,000

kilometers, many over 200,000, and are becoming prohibitively

expensive to run. We are yet to get reimbursement for last year's

operations, " Krishna added--a common complaint of ABC program

operators. " We have been able to pay all the salaries, " Krishna

said, " about $6,000 every month, " mostly donated by Krishna's

electrical engineering business, " but we do not have pockets deep

enough " to buy new vehicles.

Chennai mayor M. Subramanian on August 4, 2009 provided two

new vehicles to the Chennai city ABC program, operated by People for

Animals, but that did not help the Blue Cross of India or the

outlying suburbs. Subramanian estimated that Chennai still has

about 126,000 street dogs left to be sterilized.

Krishna and the Blue Cross of India surgeons have for 43

years demonstrated that ABC is the most effective way to control

street dogs. Also among the engineers of the Indian space program,

Krishna first presented ABC as a 1966 concept paper. For the next 30

years the Blue Cross under Krishna's direction tested ABC techniques

in Chennai, inspiring the formation of the PfA program and similar

programs in other cities. In 1996 the city governments of Chennai

and Mumbai adopted ABC in place of electrocuting dogs.

ABC was accepted as Indian national policy in December 1997,

in the last days of a Congress Party government, but was implemented

by the Bharatija Janata Party government elected in early 1998. The

BJP cabinet minister in charge of ABC was for five years People for

Animals founder Maneka Gandhi. That made ABC a frequent target of

Congress Party politicians trying to return to power.

Paradoxically, Congress Party chair Sonia Gandhi--Maneka

Gandhi's former sister-in-law--also endorsed ABC. Equally

paradoxically, ABC was and remains opposed by factions aligned with

the BJP which have used dog-catching as a source of patronage jobs

and favor animal sacrifice, also opposed by both Gandhis.

Eventually the anti-dog and pro-sacrifice factions, aligned with

biomedical researchers, forced Maneka Gandhi out of the BJP cabinet.

Ramesh, a prominent member of the present Congress

government, has been among Sonia Gandhi's inner circle since circa

2004.

" ABC is equally important as other projects of the ministry, "

said Ramesh on July 10 in New Delhi. Ramesh appeared with Animal

Welfare Board of India chair R.M. Kharb to announced publication of

Standard Operating Procedures for Sterilization of Stray Dogs under

the Animal Birth Control Programme, a new official protocol.

" This is long overdue, in that good intentions are simply

not enough. A minimum infrastructure and required levels of hygiene,

asepsis and surgical skill plus necessary aftercare are essential to

ensure minimum trauma for the dogs, " said Krishna, who was in the

audience.

Krishna noted that Greater Hydera-bad Municipal Corporation

commissioner S. P. Singh had already announced that Hyderabad would

implement the Standard Operating Procedures, 24 hours before they

were made public. " The Hyderabad ABC program was in a shambles, with

unacceptably high rates of mortality and post-operative complications

and terribly inhumane pound conditions, " Krishna said.

Earlier, on June 9, " The Kerala government directed that

all villages and municipalities should stop killing stray dogs and

should implement ABC in letter and spirit, " reported Animal Welfare

Board of India member A.G. Babu.

This followed a ruling firmly favoring ABC from the Bombay

High Court in December 2008. Similar verdicts were later issued by

the High Courts of Madras and Delhi.

ABC programs have so far mostly been introduced through

humane initiative, usually against municipal resistance. As ABC

succeeds, cities often set up their own ABC programs, some of them

conspicuously corrupt, inept, or mere fronts for traditional dog

extermination, as has been alleged in Hyderabad and

Thiruvanathapuram, the Kerala state capital.

Sikkim state in April 2009 took a different approach. The

Sikkim Anti- Rabies and Animal Health Program, known as SARAH, is

now an official part of the state Animal Husbandry, Livestock,

Fisheries and Veterinary Services Department. Formed in March 2006

as a partnership among the Sikkim government, the Australian charity

Vets Beyond Borders, and the Brigitte Bardot Foundation, SARAH had

in three years done 16,000 dog and cat sterilizations and

administered 29,000 anti-rabies vaccinations, achieving an 85%

reduction in human rabies cases.

 

Rabies-Free India

 

The initial national ABC target was to eradicate rabies

nationally by sterilizing about 10 million street dogs between

December 1997 and the end of 2005. That goal was not approached.

Funding for prophylactic rabies vaccination was not initially

included in the ABC budget, and the Indian humane community

struggled to build the capacity to sterilize dogs in high volume.

Even in Delhi, including New Delhi, the national capital,

building capacity has taken much longer than was initially hoped.

Delhi created the Society for Stray Canine Birth Control to manage

local ABC efforts in 2002. The nine humane societies performing

sterilizations in Delhi averaged under 1,000 surgeries apiece in

their first year of work, and took five years to reach 2,000 apiece,

despite modest gains in productivity in each year.

Yet ABC has had some spectacular regional successes.

Combining ABC with prototypes for Rabies-Free India, a new

Animal Welfare Board program, Chennai, Jaipur, and Visakhapatnam

had all eradicated rabies and achieved marked dog population

reductions by mid-decade. Bangalore achieved similar results in the

inner city, until a 2007 political backlash exploiting two dog

attacks in outer suburbs halted the Banglore programs for months and

killed hundreds of dogs who had already been sterilized and

vaccinated.

Animal Help showed in Ahmedabad that Indian surgical teams

using up-to-date methods could sterilize as many as 45,000 dogs per

year. The Ahmedabad program was dismantled by political opposition,

then restarted under other operators who fell short of the Animal

Help achievements. Ahmeda-bad still has about 200,000 street dogs at

large, according to city officials. The Animal Help team is now

working in the outer Bangalore suburbs, and is conducting an ABC

demonstration project in Bhutan, sponsored by the Humane Society

International subsidiary of the Humane Society of the United States.

The net accomplishment of the first dozen years of ABC was to

reduce the Indian street dog population by 20%.

The Rabies-Free India campaign will seek to vaccinate every

dog in India against rabies, a longtime goal of the Indian humane

community and often mentioned by Kharb as a priority. " Ramesh has

also promised the necessary funding to start the RFI campaign

[nationwide], " Krishna said. " Ramesh asked Kharb for a detailed

roadmap to achieve this within 15 days. I left Delhi on the

afternoon of the 10th after the meeting, " Krishna told ANIMAL

PEOPLE. " When I reached home at 9 p.m., I was delighted to find the

outline of the roadmap for the RFI campaign in my e-mail. "

 

Attacks challenge

 

" The dogged battle is won--but the war is still on, "

cautioned A.G. Babu, welcoming the new official support for ABC,

but citing continued resistance from " bureaucrats, ministers,

megalomaniac politicians of various hues and colors, and above all

the hostile media, hellbent to prove that killing strays is the

only way out. "

An example of how quickly dog massacres can be incited if the

humane community fails to respond effectively to attacks occurred in

the first week of August.

Awakening at two a.m., creeping outside, and trying to make

his way to his uncle Rohidas Patil's house, five-year-old Avinash

Patil of Bhiwandi met a pack of as many as 15 dogs, said the

neighbors who rescued him. Losing much of his scalp and suffering

deep wounds to his stomach, hands, and back, Avinash Patil was

turned away from the first two hospitals he was taken to, after the

doctors on duty claimed they had no emergency facilities and no

post-exposure rabies vaccine. A third hospital provided

post-exposure vaccination and sutured his wounds nearly two hours

after the attack.

" This incident took place under the jurisdiction of Thane, "

a northern Mumbai suburb, reported Lata Mishra of the Mumbai Mirror.

" However, in Mumbai more than 50,000 dog bites are recorded each

year. The Bombay Municipal Corporation has stepped up sterilization

to control the dog population and reduce attacks on humans. "

" We sterilized 33,000 dogs in 2008 as compared to 13,000 in

2007. This year, in the first six months, we reached 20,000, "

said Mumbai health officer Gourish Ambe.

" I was asked by a news channel to comment on the Patil

incident, " recounted Thane SPCA spokesperson Shakuntala Majumdar.

" I was at a loss for what to say. On one side there is this little

child fighting for his life, half his face, his thighs and legs

chewed away. He could very well have been my child. On the other,

there were these dogs, probably hungry and foraging for food.

" In the last three or four years many of us actively involved

in animal welfare work have noticed a disturbing rise, " Majumdar

said, " in cases of stray dogs behaving in a vicious manner,

especially in packs. "

The Patil attack was misrepresented to some extent in

sensational reportage.

" When India TV carried this news, " recounted Rishi Dev of

Citizens for Animal Rights in New Delhi, " I was shocked to see

video of my pet dog, which they took a few years back for some show,

being aired as the ferocious dog who bit the child. Within 15

minutes I sent India TV a legal notice by e-mail. The owner of the

channel and their all-India wildlife correspondent communicated to me

and apologized. "

But the tendency for the most dangerous part of a dog

population to be the last to be reduced through either sterilization

or extermination efforts has been observed for decades, and will

have to be addressed by ABC service providers.

ANIMAL PEOPLE guest columnist Margaret Anne Cleek explained

the phenomenon in November 1993. " Our efforts have created an

overnight change in the evolution of the dog, " Cleek wrote. " We are

seeing not an across-the-board reduction in the dog population, but

rather a restriction of range, skewing the distribution toward

larger, more aggressive dogs. " This occurs, Cleek pointed out,

because the people who keep, feed, and breed large, aggressive

dogs tend to be most resistant to having dogs sterilized, and

because the least socialized street dogs are the most difficult to

catch and handle.

On the streets, as other dogs vacate habitat, the most

evasive and aggressive dogs take over the food sources--and those in

the largest, fastest-moving packs enjoy an edge that they did not

have when resident dogs were plentiful enough to keep roving dogs out

of their neighborhoods.

The safest approach to introducing the Animal Birth Control

program would have begun with catching the most hostile and elusive

dogs first. However, ABC programs have always been pressured to

prove themselves by reducing the numbers of dogs as rapidly as

possible, so have usually concentrated first on the easiest cases.

Likewise, goondas hired to kill dogs, paid by the head,

focus on the dogs they can most easily catch, leaving the most

dangerous part of the dog population at large.

Within days of Ramesh's pledge of support for ABC, ANIMAL

PEOPLE received reports of goondas hired by local officials

massacring dogs in the cities of Chickballapur, Jamalpur, Siddapur,

Uppal, Mallikarjuna Nagar, and Peerzadiguda. But the killing was

blamed on lack of effective ABC programs, not praised as inevitable.

--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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