The Indian Express | 2 months ago | 28-03-2023 | 11:45 am
In ‘The Truth Bites’ (IE, March 21), Abi T Vanak makes a number of statements which warrant contestation. He writes, “Worse still, dogs are responsible for over 20,000 rabies deaths.” One presumes that he means 20,000 human deaths from rabies every year.Since 2005, the Union government’s Ministry of Health and Family Welfare’s Central Bureau of Health Intelligence (CBHI) has been annually publishing a National Health Profile for the country. According to the 2021 edition, there were 105 cases of human death from rabies in India in 2019. The 2018 edition put the figure at 97 in 2017. According to the relevant preceding annual National Health Profiles, there were 86 human deaths from rabies in 2016, 113 in 2015, 125 in 2014 and 132 in 2013.Vanak writes, “The only long-term solution is to implement strict pet ownership rules, prohibit people from carelessly feeding dogs everywhere, and set up facilities funded by animal welfare organisations that can either house dogs for life or, or humanely euthanise them so that they don’t suffer on the streets.”Confining stray dogs in facilities and/or killing them (humane euthanasia is a euphemism) is subversive of the implementation of the ABC programme under which street dogs are picked up from an area, sterilised and vaccinated against rabies, and returned to the same area. Being territorial, they keep unsterilised and unvaccinated dogs out and the authorities can concentrate on sterilising and vaccinating in new areas until all stray dogs in a city or district are covered. Killing all dogs in an area would enable unsterilised, unvaccinated dogs to come in and the authorities will have to return again and again to the same area to kill the new arrivals. Until the promulgation of the ABC Rules, the number of stray dogs continued to increase in India despite relentless mass killings.Vanak writes, “Even if they are sterilised, dogs that continue to live on streets will bite, chase people and vehicles, get into accidents, suffer from hunger and disease and remain in conflict with people.”The ABC programme serves to reduce cases of dog bites. Since sterilised bitches do not go into heat, fights among dogs over bitches, which raise their aggression levels, do not occur during the mating season. This drastically reduces the number of instances in which a higher level of aggression leads to a greater intolerance of provocation and biting of people. Also, since sterilised bitches do not have litters, one does not witness the rise in aggression levels that occurs when they are guarding their puppies against threats — which are many, given how humans treat animals. Significantly, many get bitten while teasing, hitting, or trying to take away puppies.Also, “humane” euthanasia does not help. In its Eighth Report, (WHO Technical Report Series 824), the WHO’s Expert Committee on Rabies, had stated in 1991: “There is no evidence that the removal of dogs has ever had a significant impact on dog population densities and the spread of 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.”K Bogel, Chief Veterinary, Public Health, Division of Communicable diseases, World Health Organization (WHO), and John Hoyt, then President, World Society for the Protection of Animals (WSPA), as well as the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS), stated in their joint preface to the Guidelines for Dog Population Management released by the WHO and WSPA in May 1990: “All too often, authorities confronted by problems caused by these [stray] dogs have turned to mass destruction in the hope of finding a quick solution, only to find that the destruction had to continue, year after year, with no end in sight.”Vanak writes, “To expect a developing country like India to invest thousands of crores of rupees to set up necessary infrastructure and deploy lakhs of people to catch dogs, operate on them and take care of them is a pipe dream. Especially considering that many regions of this country do not have adequate infrastructure for public health.”Lakhs of people will also have to be employed to go on catching stray dogs for killing or confinement, and veterinary surgeons to perform the executions. Housing and feeding stray dogs permanently in “facilities” will require a continuous flow of funds. A huge amount of money will be required for buying injection syringes and lethal drugs for killing, and the safe disposal of bodies. And, of course, new infrastructure has to be established in many areas for all this.Human-stray dog relations face many issues. These have to be resolved humanely and effectively.The writer is a senior journalist
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