Surat Municipal corporation to increase dogs carrying capacity and sterilisation process

Surat city has witnessed several incidents of stray dog attacks recently. On February 23, a two-year-old daughter of construction labourers, who was mauled by four stray dogs while playing outside her house at Khajod, succumbed to injuries at the New Civil Hospital (NCH) in Surat city.

Following the incident, several residents had slammed the civic body for not taking action to address the issue of stray dog menace.

“A total of 1,205 cases of dog bites were recorded at the NCH last year. Between February 1 and 15, a total of 477 such cases were recorded at the NCH ,” said the Chief Medical officer of NCH Dr Omkar Choudhary.

On March 3, Dr Rajesh Ghelani, additional superintendent at the market department of the SMC, and Jignesh Jadav, livestock inspector, had visited the dog shelter home in Jodhpur.

At the shelter home, dogs that show abnormal behaviour are kept observation dogs.

Senior Veterinary surgeon at the Rajasthan Animal Husbandary Department, who is also dealing with the Jodhpur dog shelter home, Dr J A Kazi said, “The shelter home has been running since long and stray dogs are brought here and steriliser. The dogs suffering from rabies are kept separately. We have shared the details with Surat team which visited our shelter home.”

After the studying the steps taken by the authorities there to tackle the stray dog issue, the SMC team had returned March 5.

The Surat civic body runs Animal Birth Control (ABC) centre at Bhestan where stray dogs are taken for sterilisation and given anti-rabies injections. The SMC had in 2021 given a contract to a firm — Vet Society for Animal Welfare and Rural Development — for catching stray dogs and bringing them to the ABC centre, where the behaviour pattern of dogs will be observed.

“The agency has been given the contract to sterilise 20,000 stray dogs in the city and to date they have sterilised 12,300 stray dogs. SMC pays Rs 1,395 to the firm for every dog they are catching,” Dr. Rajesh Ghelani said.

“The Jodhpur dog shelter has large space where at a time they keep over 1,000 dogs, while we have the capacity to keep around 250 dogs at a time. By March 31, we will increase the number of cages to house 400 dogs at a time. The dogs are kept in a big cage with partitions so that they don’t fall into quarrels with other dogs. The stray dogs are kept for five days in the cage for sterilisation and anti-rabies injection, and are later released at the same location from where they are caught,” he added.

According to Dr Ghelani, the city has over 35,000 stray dogs in the city.

“Daily, we receive around 40 complaints over stray dog attacks. The contract agency also had increased the number of staffers and we have increased the number of sterilisations per day from 30 to 35 stray dogs,” he said.

“Once we are capable to keep around 400 stray dogs at a time at the ABC centre, we will increase the number of dogs sterlised per day to 60. By doing this, we would soon get majority of dogs sterilised. The dogs which suffer from diseases or injuries are also kept at the centre and are released being treated. Even, the behaviour pattern of stray dogs will be noted in the AB centre.”

Dr Digvijay Ram, Superintendent of the SMC market department, said, “ Last month, 487 stray dogs were caught by our teams and 30 stray dogs were sterilized. We will increase the sterilization activities and increase staffers for the same in the coming days.”