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Journalism of Courage
Last week six-year-old Mamoon was attacked by stray dogs while playing with his friends. He was clawed open, with injuries all over his tiny body, bleeding profusely, dead before reaching the hospital. The South Delhi Municipal Corporation’s responsibility
ends with sterilisation and rehabilitation. Which basically means, stray dogs are released once neutered and left to fend for themselves on Delhi’s streets. This makes them less vicious but by no means, harmless.
While we mourn this senseless, gruesome tragedy, one must question if we are all in agreement that human life takes precedence
over other species, whatever they might be. To add to India’s ever growing list of dubious distinctions, we have the largest population of stray dogs in the world. An estimated 20,000 people die every year of rabies infections.
Homeless canines are skulking everywhere, terrorising people on roads, scavenging the strewn mounds of garbage, howling through the night and making citizens miserable.
The ethics of animals’ rights, especially those running wild in cities is fraught with complexities. There can be no nuanced debate on the strays problem in India since it immediately becomes a shouting match between animal activists, who carry an aura of moral superiority, and those of us whose lives are affected daily by packs of feral dogs.
Apparently you can’t be both — an animal lover, and somebody who believes we have a right to walk on the streets without fear of being attacked. Nor can we object to stepping in faeces left to rot on public sidewalks because dog owners think it is their pet’s birthright to litter wherever they want (as long as it isn’t right outside their own houses). Like in the West, there need to be hefty fines for this to change.
A hysterically bizarre scene plays out in Lodhi Gardens daily, where strays have bitten half of India’s bureaucracy. It is not unusual to see men in their 50s suddenly start sprinting and running like the
wind, with fang-baring dogs chasing after them.
It turns out it’s possible to teach an old dog new tricks, going by the romantic odes written about the good samaritans who have miraculously turned the strays of Lodhi into guard dogs. They now officially live in the garden and are well fed by the NDMC staff.
Barely 500 meters away, between the quietly elegant bungalows of Golf Links, The Oberoi and Delhi Golf Club, scenes of squalor and desperate poverty play out under the flyover. The irony is the dogs have been rehabilitated before these homeless destitute, whom they are now trained to chase away when they slumber into the garden seeking some solace.
Lodhi Gardens is all but closed to the poor, but open to stray dogs. In modern living, there’s tragically little empathy for our fellow human beings, a large number of whom deserve some compassion too.
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