Opinion Dog attacks: Instead of whipping up fear, we need to concentrate on solutions. There is only one effective way to reduce street dog population
Mass elimination of street dogs does not work. We should learn from places like Jaipur that have implemented the Animal Birth Control programme effectively.
Police said that Arjun lived with his family in makeshift huts outside the village. On Sunday, while playing outside his home, he noticed a kite and ran chasing it (Representative image/Express) 
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It is astonishing to those of us who live and work with dogs to find them suddenly catapulted into the middle of a raging debate. We thought the issue had been settled aeons ago when they were christened man’s best friend; when we entrusted them to guide our blind; when we inducted them into our security forces to protect our borders and vital installations; when we depended upon them to comfort our sick and lonely; when we counted upon them to find and bring home lost travellers and mountaineers; when we expected them to guard our homes and families; when we relied upon them to risk their own lives to save ours so much so that the Chief Imam of Turkey kissed the paw of a dog to express gratitude for all the survivors they’d tirelessly dug out of the rubble; when the Mahabharata had Yudhishthir refusing to enter heaven without the dog who had remained by him through thick and thin; when Gandhi proclaimed that the greatness of a nation could be judged by the way it treated its animals.
So what’s changed?
There is a new and ugly narrative being played out that connects incidents from here and there to build up a false impression that dogs are dangerous. No learning goes into our relationship with animals. They are expected to do all the learning — to sit, to stand, to come to go. And they do. They understand all our languages — commands hurled at them from English to Punjabi to Gujarati in the same household. But we put in no effort to understand them. For example, one simple safety rule is that when a dog approaches, do not run. A dog’s natural instinct is to chase a moving object. This is not an attack or a hostile gesture but a game. So simply teaching ourselves and our children to stand still without screaming or hitting out, will ensure that a dog smells you and goes his way. So a necessary part of the way forward is introducing basic behavioural lessons that both teachers and parents can impart.
Instead of whipping up fear and disharmony, we need to collectively be concentrating on solutions. The ABC programme (Animal Birth Control) wherein dogs are sterilised, vaccinated and replaced in their original areas is the only effective method to reduce our street dog population, end biting and eliminate rabies. Although introduced in 2001, the ABC programme has neither been extended across the country nor been systematically or even consistently implemented. As much as funding and training, what’s needed is an effective publicity push that encourages public support and participation in very much the manner that empowered India’s polio programme.
We should highlight the excellent results from where the programme has been effectively implemented — Goa, Sikkim, Jaipur — and replicate those models. Regular feeding of dogs which is crucial to the success of the programme has still not been properly understood as the way to render dogs friendly and operation worthy. Most of all, we must guard against quick fixes As WHO warns, “All too often, authorities confronted by problems caused by street 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.”
To paraphrase Gandhiji, the greatness of a nation lies in its ability to learn the right lessons towards creating a kinder and gentler world for all.
(The writer is trustee, People for Animals, India’s largest animal welfare organisation)
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