BENGALURU: An ecosystem, irrespective of how fluent or flawed it may be, is a fragile system. Its core impulse is one of inertia in dynamic equilibrium: several moving parts – organic, of course – keep the system stable. Like the most sensitive see-saw one can imagine, addition or removal of anything to or from this system could snowball into a drastic consequence, which in many cases can be irrevocable.
The story of the Indian stray dog is a story of an organic moving part of an ecosystem: whether the system itself is flawed or not, as aforementioned, is quite a different question at which to arrive. The dog, a living cog, moves indeed, and yet constricts itself to its neighbourhood, exactly how an organic part within an ecosystem moves and yet helps the system at large maintain equilibrium.
The recent Supreme Court verdict on November 7, regarding the permanent removal of dogs from certain public spaces, is one that has its feet planted on two boats and mired in self-contradiction: a rather unseemly omen from a judiciary that has seemed to fail to land at stability in its skirmish against the country’s stray dogs.
The Greater Bengaluru Authority (GBA) is one of the many municipal bodies in the country who have displayed a sort of eagerness to implement the order, which has not only worsened the situation, but also ironically made the body go against the chronology of the steps of conduct mentioned in the ruling itself.
The Supreme Court of India, on November 7, ordered the permanent removal of stray dogs from institutional areas such as schools, hospitals, and hubs of transport like bus and train stations. These dogs, according to the directions of the bench, must be shifted to shelters after vaccination and sterilisation. It did, however, leave room for dogs picked from other localities being brought back after vaccination and sterilisation: “The provision in Rule 11(19) that the dogs, upon sterilisation and immunisation, should be relocated to the same locality from which they have been picked up, is scientifically carved out inasmuch as it serves two purposes.
Firstly, the same prevents the scope of overcrowding in the dog shelters/pounds, and secondly, the picked-up stray dogs after immunisation and sterilisation are relocated to the same environment where they were living earlier, which is a compassionate treatment (sic).”
This is where the GBA’s stance on the matter becomes peculiar. Special commissioner Vikas Suralkar Kishor, in a conversation with activists from the city, revealed the plan for “temporary shelters” where stray dogs that have been rounded up will be shifted. Despite appearances of novelty, these are nothing but animal birth control (ABC) centres across Bengaluru being repurposed to fit the bill, while new shelters are promised to be built. Beyond this vagary of assurance, lies no clarity as to when or where these temporary shelters will be built at all, let alone permanent shelters or pounds.
Dr. Akshay Prakash, who runs an ABC centre by the name of Sarvodaya Sevabhavi Samstha, was approached by the Bengaluru South City Corporation (BSCC) to not only let the latter use the centre as a temporary shelter, but also help in catching dogs and moving them to the shelter, a responsibility that falls completely and unarguably under the GBA. “You are here by ordered to catch & House the Institutional Dogs as mentioned in the directions of the Honourable Supreme Court in the limits of BSCC in ABC Center allotted to you till a suitable shelter is arranged (sic),” read the official communication dated December 4. Dr. Prakash refused, citing the already overexerted situation at his centre, a fate that is shared by most in the city.
According to Kishor, the GBA has delegated the responsibility of keeping count of the number of dogs at institutional places to the institutions themselves. He also verbally expresses disdain towards the prospect of following the chronology of steps put forward by the Supreme Court (removal of dogs must be preceded by proper identification and fencing of all the concerned institutions) insisting that a lot of the responsibilities at hand like institutions submitting the counts of dogs on their premises, picking up dogs, scouting possible places for permanent shelters, appointing nodal officers, using ABC centres as temporary shelters, and more, could be done simultaneously.
The result is a situation where no one knows the current number of dogs that stand to be removed, there is no clarity on where the permanent shelters are going to be, dogs are being picked up with nowhere to go (acknowledging the lack of space at ABC centres in South Bengaluru, Kishor says that centres in the North do have some capacity), and the institutions are not being fenced properly.
City-based lawyer Alwyn Sebastian, who is one of the activists working and observing on the ground, mentions that the dog removal squads operating have no nodal officers who would otherwise be in charge of ensuring smooth operations and keeping an account of the number of dogs being picked up from a given institution.
This essentially means, if the premises of an institution were to have 20 dogs for instance, and if only four to five of them could be picked, there would be nothing and no one to stop the handlers from picking 15 other dogs from random places to fill the mandate: a scenario that Sebastian and his fellow activists have been alleging to have been happening.
Hypothetically then, if one were to confine these dogs from different places to an already claustrophobic ABC centre, it would be a fertile hotbed for not just cross-contamination, but also an all out pandemonium involving conflict between the animals, who belong to an extremely territorial species.
Challenges
Given this present context, let us now revisit the dynamic equilibrium we began with, considering an institutional space to be an ecosystem exhibiting the same sort of phenomena and characteristics. In the absence of proper fencing, taking any number of dogs from a given institutional space would create a vacuum corresponding to the same number.
If all of them are removed, then it creates the maximum degree of vacuum possible for the entity in question: dogs. Without fencing, whose responsibility the Supreme Court has absolved the municipal corporations of and delegated entirely to the institutions themselves, the ecosystem is not closed, but open; like water rushes into a compromised, sinking ship, by the diktat of nature, neighbouring dogs will rush in to occupy the space, bringing in their own set of diseases, and facilitating spontaneous cross-contamination.
Sindhoor Pangal, a canine behaviour consultant and the founder of Bangalore Hundeskole Academy of Research and Canine Studies (BHARCS), suggests that this, combined with the aforementioned situation at the temporary or permanent shelters, could possibly create new diseases like COVID, only far stronger, given India’s resistant immunity.
Dr. S. Chinny Krishna, co-founder of Blue Cross of India, puts forth an important question here: beyond educational or medical institutions, can railway stations be fenced? Can bus stands or bus stops be fenced? The sheer implausibility of this makes the task a Sisyphian ordeal: bring five dogs out, and another five, if not more, will rush to occupy the vacancy. “Einstein defined insanity as the practice of repeating the same action over and over again, expecting different results,” reminds Dr. Krishna.
This brings us to a key pivot: is the solution then, instead of such half-measures, a complete elimination of the category known as stray dogs, which does not exist in the West? Given India’s context, even from a purely anthropocentric perspective that might be apathetic to the plight of the helpless, the answer would be a resounding no.
Finding workable solutions
One of the key components of an ecosystem maintaining dynamic equilibrium is its food chain; now if stray dogs, hypothetically, were to be entirely removed from an Indian ecosystem – one in which its primary sources of survival are garbage, smaller animals or carcasses, and the occasional charity from humans – the equilibrium is damaged, left with a gaping hole.
The Newtonian philosophy of an action having an equal and opposite reaction would, of course, apply here, leading to a population outburst of an entity that, as England of the 17th Century would attest, might be far harder to suppress: rats (and other vermin).
Dr. Krishna alluded to the Surat incident of 1994, where the city’s municipal commissioner ordered the extermination of all the stray dogs in the city limits, following which Surat was gripped with a population outburst of rats, and the obvious consequence: the bubonic plague.
If reducing conflicts in India between stray dogs and humans prioritising the latter’s safety and well-being is the motive, urban planners, specialists, veterinarians, and the widely-lambasted group of "social outliers" reviled as activists stand at an absolute consensus of prognosis: birth control.
Dr. Krishna asserts that a male dog’s aggression primarily emanates from testosterone, and a female dog’s aggression is conditional upon whether or not she is a mother to pups: if she is, the aggression could be attributed to a motherly instinct common across species, one that, often for good reason, sees the world as a threat to her offspring(s).
Beyond this, animals at the end of the day are no more predictable than humans themselves are, and there will always remain cases of innately aggressive dogs, insane or rabid dogs, or dogs being provoked by children who do not know better. If the last could be solved by parental supervision, the sterilising, neutering and rehabilitating the stray dogs of Bengaluru – and the country at large – to their original neighbourhoods would leave only a minority of dogs who are unfit for society, which can in turn be admitted to permanent shelters.
Birth control, a solution so widely accepted and proven to be effective towards the well-being of not just one entity like stray dogs but the entire Indian ecosystem at large, lies in wanton abandonment, with ill-advised rashness at the helm of policy and implementation. The writing is on the wall, legible to most; it must be read before it is too late.
The story is reported by Anubhab Roy of The New Indian Express.
