Stray Dog Menace

“Barking dogs seldom bite”- albeit a popular proverb, the Chennai dogs hardly seem to be aware of it!!

My father usually takes walks very early in the morning to avoid the scorching heat of the Chennai summer. Today morning while he was walking in one of the streets, a few dogs ganged up and ambushed. Startled and baffled, my father fell down, providing an easy access to the dogs to come closer. The dog’s teeth pierced through his pants and then his leg. Even while the people around were trying to shoo the dog away, the provoked dogs didn’t easily budge. Eventually as more people gathered, the relentless dogs were driven away. 

The treatment for dog bites is not as much an ordeal today as it was earlier- summing up to a five injections including the tetanus toxoid, though it goes on for about a month. To our irony, most of pharmacies had a stockpile of the rabies vaccine, but there was a paucity of the TT injections. Are dog bites more common than the cases requiring TT, seriously? One of the popular comic scenes in a tamil movie, shows how gullible people (like comedian Vadivelu) are made to have dog bites and duped by people in collusion with the doctors. One wonders if multinational pharma companies are breeding and rearing stray dogs. In reality, these companies are exploiting the rampant dog menace to loot money by their ever soaring prices of the rabies vaccines. 

Of late, the population of stray dogs has exploded in the neighbouring areas. Two decades ago, the dogs were caught by the municipality vans and then killed to control the dog births. This aroused serious ructions by the members of Prevention of Cruelty on Animals owing to ethical concerns. The shooting ritual was discontinued, which then followed a treatment to render them sterile and non-reproducible through the Animal Birth Control (ABC) program. Deaths and injuries caused by dog bites are commonplace today, including the infants being brutally eaten up by the stray dogs. The cases are just shut up by providing a meager compensation to the families for the deaths. 

Today my father was a victim, tomorrow it could be any one of us! Finding a solution requires concerted and persistent efforts by all the residents in an area.  First of all, civic body has to implement serious measures to sterilize and immunize all the stray dogs. Secondly, the ABC program should also provide shelter to the stray dogs and not release them in the residential localities after the treatment, as they pose a grave threat to people to even walk on the streets freely. 

A clarion call for the people residing in such areas to stay dog(ged) and not dodge from their responsibilities and cooperation in tackling the life threatening dog menace!