No solution to stray dog menace

After getting the approval by the High Court, for relocating the city’s stray dogs, the BMC now wants to move the Supreme Court to revoke the ban on killing the dogs

In April this year, Khatri Ram Singh was admitted to Nair Hospital. “He was afraid of water and even the fan. He had to be bound, but he somehow escaped and started running around the hospital.

The police had to be called in to restrain him,” says Dr Mahesh Hiralal Shah, deputy dean of Nair Hospital. Unfortunately, Singh died the next day; he had contracted rabies, six months after being bitten by a rabid dog.

Singh’s is not a one-off case. As Mumbai’s dog population grows, so does the number of dog bites and incidence of rabies. “At least 21 people succumbed to rabies last year in the city, and seven have already died this year in Nair Hospital,” adds Dr Shah.

According to records of the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC), there were 45,183 reported cases of dog bites in 2006 and 43,980 in 2005.

This has prompted the BMC to challenge the 1994 High Court ban on killing stray dogs. The BMC plans to move the Supreme Court and get the order reversed. Commissioner Jairaj Phatak recently  said that if Mumbai is to be like Shanghai then, like Shanghai, the city too has to kill stray dogs to solve the problem.

Abodh Aras from the NGO, Welfare of Stray Dogs   (WSD) says that the killing strays is not the solution. “Till 1994, the BMC used to kill stray dogs, but this did not see any decrease in the number of dog bite cases in the city,” he says.

In their initial proposal, the BMC wanted to use 50 acres of land on the outskirts of the city to create dog homes, where male and female dogs will be housed separately. But NGOs condemned the idea. The BMC’s latest proposal is also unacceptable.

“After getting the approval of the High Court for relocating the dogs outside the city, and after identifying two plots of land in Vasai and Palghar, the BMC has now come up with this ridiculous idea,” says Fizza Shah of In Defence of Animals.

Even as the debate continues, the threat of being attacked by a rabid dog is still a reality. Bertilia Fernandes, (18), college student, was returning to her Santacruz home late in the evening, when a stray dog attacked her.

It bit her upper thigh, refusing to let go until a group of men shooed it away. Fernandes, who has three pet dogs, will not forget the attack. “Whenever I am walking alone on the streets and I see a dog even from a distance, it sends a chill down my spine.”

Dr Vaishya Mane of Nair Hospital agrees, “Something needs to be done about the high number of dog bites. We keep getting  many cases through the year.”

The solution many feel lies in changing attitudes and a cleaner environment. Dr Gyanendra Nath Gongal of the World Health Organisation says, “Killing or isolating strays is not the solution. Sterilisation and vaccination on a mass scale, proper waste management and awareness about rabies is the way to go.”