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MONTH: January/February 2007

Indian street pigs are mostly not feral

DELHI, MYSORE, BANGALORE--India easily leads the world in numbers of street pigs, but relatively few are completely feral. Much of the Indian domestic pig population roams the streets to forage, loosely attended by herders who may be blocks away. Relatively few pigs are raised in confinement, in a nation whose upper caste Hindus, Jains, Buddhists, and Muslims have traditionally shunned pork.

Historically, only what are now called the "scheduled" castes, "tribals," and the Christian minority ate pork. For millennia, pig-herding was accordingly a minor and not very profitable branch of animal husbandry. This has recently abruptly changed. A high birth rate among "scheduled" castes, increasing affluence among "scheduled" caste members who have pursued subsidized education, enabling them to buy more meat, and weakening caste barriers throughout Indian society have enabled pig herders to rapidly expand their markets.

"Breeding pigs is big business," The Hindu newspaper recently explained. "Assuming that per capita consumption of pork is one half kilogram (about one pound) per week, and that less than 5% of the population eat pork, a city the size of Mysore would consume 26,000 pigs per year."

Just one confinement barn may hold that many pigs in the U.S., China, and other pork-eating nations. The pigs' effluent might be noticed, but the pigs themselves are not. Usually the barns are far from any city.

Few as pigs are in India, relatively speaking, they are increasingly visible, especially in cities where Animal Birth Control programs encouraged by national law and subsidized by the Animal Welfare Board of India have reduced street dog populations, making more refuse available to pigs.

Street dogs have long been feared by many Indians because of the risk of rabies. Dogs are still the chief vectors for rabies in India, which still has more reported human and animal cases than the rest of the world combined--but pigs can also carry rabies, they deliver a stronger bite, and though street dogs continue to far outnumber street pigs, suspicion is growing that the pigs may be far more dangerous.

Delhi, the Indian capital, is among the cities where ABC programs have been underway the longest. Delhi also is among the cities where street-dwelling pig production has most conspicuously expanded. There is as yet no Indian national policy on street pigs, but that could change soon as result of two attacks on children within three days in the northwest Delhi suburb of Samaipur Badly.

On November 28, 2006, three-year-old Ajay Yadeav wandered outdoors with his lunch, and within minutes was killed and partially eaten by pigs. The pigs' owner, a man named Jachche, was reportedly held for causing death due to negligence, but the pigs remained at large.

On November 30, 2006, a pig bit the head and shoulder of a six-year-old, who survived.
The Hindu has been reporting similar incidents in growing numbers, from all parts of India. For example, Pedapati Manikyam, 65, of Pedaboddepalli village, about 100 kilometres north of Visakhapatnam, was asleep in her home on October 27, 2005, The Hindu recounted, when two pigs belonging to local herders approached her, and bit her right hand off when she tried to slap them away.

"The woman died due to profuse loss of blood," The Hindu said.

Disease threat

But overt attacks, horrifying as they are, are much less a threat to humans than diseases transmitted by pig parasites, insects who breed in pig wallows, and influenza viruses for whom pigs are an intermediary between wild waterfowl and humans.

The influenza epidemic of 1918, which killed more people in India than anywhere else, was only the deadliest of many outbreaks which are believed to have mutated among pigs before hitting humans.
Typically a flu strain does not become epidemic among humans until it develops the ability to spread from human to human. A flu strain evolving to spread from pig to pig, and then from pig to human, is the typical precursor of a serious outbreak.

Accordingly, while the avian flu H5N1 has killed more than 150 people since 1996 who had close contact with infected poultry, most of whom have been stricken since 2003, epidemiologists have been most concerned about the risk of crossover to pigs, which might occur most readily in India. Large populations of both free-roaming pigs and humans living almost together, with poor sanitation and inadequate health care, together form the nexus that could turn H5N1 from a scourge of poultry and occasional threat to humans into a possible repetition of 1918, whose spread might be expedited by jet travel.

A more immediate threat is Japanese encephalitis, carried by mosquitoes who reproduce in liquefied pig excrement.

"Mosquitoes are held responsible for an outbreak of Japanese encephalitis that has claimed the lives of more than 480 children in Uttar Pradesh," reported South China Morning Post Delhi correspondent Amrit Dhillon in September 2005, "but pigs must share the blame. Half a kilometre from the BRD Medical College in Gorakhpur, where most of the victims died, low-caste Hindu families rear pigs and live in unimaginably filthy conditions.

"The pigs are never given food or drink by their impoverished owners," Dhillon wrote. "Instead, the animals root among rotten vegetable peels, mutton bones and decaying fruit on rubbish dumps, and snort through open gutters in search of food. The pigs can be sold for around $110 U.S., so they are both an important source of income, and a source of the killer disease. Japanese encephalitis has struck northern India every year since 1978," Dhillion said.

Federal health minister Anbumani Ramdoss ordered the Uttar Pradesh government state to move pigs out of residential areas and away from hospitals, but the order had small chance of being enforced.
The death toll eventually rose to more than 1,000, including about 800 in India and 200-plus in neighboring Nepal.

Uttar Pradesh director general of health O.P. Singh told Marjorie Mason of Associated Press that vaccinating the seven million children at risk of contracting Japanese encephalitis would cost about $58 million. The state's entire health budget for the year was just $25 million.

Sanitation

The conditions producing the Uttar Pradesh outbreak appeared to be more typical for India than exceptional.

At Ramanathapuram, Tamil Nadu, "inside the government hospital has become an important habitat for pigs," The Hindu reported in March 2006. "At least 50 to 75 pigs can be seen inside and outside the hospital," The Hindu asserted. "Similarly, open places at the Tamil Nadu Housing Board Colony are attracting pigs, because drain water flowing in the colony has created six ponds in the complex. According to a rough estimate," the anonymous Hindu reporter assessed, "the current pig population is around 1,500 to 2,000."

The Ramanathapuram Municipal Council authorized shooting the pigs, but there was no immediate follow-up.

In Ongole, The Hindu reported in May 2006, "70-80 persons belonging to scheduled castes and tribes are rearing about 10,000 pigs. The trade has become so lucrative," The Hindu alleged, "that other castes have taken up the profession."

After the Andhra Pradesh High Court in March 2006 ordered Ongole to control street pigs within six months, city officials two months later "engaged the services of 20 persons belonging to the Nakkala community in Nellore, who have expertise to kill stray pigs and dogs," The Hindu said. "Carrying country-made (homemade) guns, they went around the town killing pigs."

No other mention of dogs was made.

"The pig rearers, who have been violating High Court orders to confine the animals, came around and sought the mercy of the health officials," promising to sell the surviving pigs in Bangalore "in the next couple of days," The Hindu continued.

The story was similar in Shimoga, Karnataka. Shimoga city employees began sporadic pig purges in mid-February 2005. Predictably failing to clear the streets of pigs for long, the Shimoga poisoning in July 2006 ran into political trouble when seven cows were poisoned along with 450 pigs.

Meanwhile, in Hiriyur, east of Shimoga and north of Bangalore, city officials announced a campaign against pigs, but suspended it after the pig herders complained to a justice of the Karnataka Lokayukta, or anti-corruption agency.

"The swine menace had reached unbearable proportions," fumed the Deccan Herald. "Tiny tots carrying lunch boxes to school and housewives returning from shopping with bags of groceries were the main targets of the pigs. There have been instances where these animals have bitten children after chasing them for some distance."

Poisoning

The Davangere municipal council in February 2005 poisoned more than 2,000 street pigs, after three schoolchildren were bitten by pigs in a single day.

The council, after poisoning 1,000 pigs in late 2004, "had given a month's deadline for the owners of the animals to take the pigs outside the city. The deadline expired 14 days ago," The Hindu said.
By March 2005, Davangere had poisoned 5,000 pigs, and had become the model for poisoning campaigns planned in Mysore, Hubli-Dharwad, and Raichur.

"They used zinc phosphate mixed with flour, and making it into rolls, placed it all over the city," Mysore administrative task force member H.R. Bapu Satyanarayana told The Hindu. "In four days they found 5,000 pigs lying dead."

Other Mysore officials were much less enthusiastic. After more than a year of repeatedly warning pig herders that free-roaming pigs might be poisoned or shot on sight, city workers in June 2005 trucked about 25 pigs to the municipal sewage treatment plant. The Mysore pig population meanwhile rose from about 18,000 in April 2005 to about 20,000 going into 2006.

"Nearly 200 families depend on pig rearing in the city," reported the Deccan Herald. "The pig owners are refusing to move their pigs beyond the city limits, demanding basic amenities in compensation."

Confrontations over pigs commenced in Hubli-Dharwad in 2004, when then-mayor Anilkumar Patil ordered the police to shoot free-roaming pigs. The pig herders rallied against the shooting, then removed their herds, temporarily. In 2006, after discussion of shooting or poisoning pigs subsided, the pigs returned in force.

In September 2006, Hubli-Dharward health officer A.C. Swamy "warned that criminal cases would be registered against those engaged in rearing pigs who fail to prevent the animals from straying on roads," The Hindu reported. "He said all pigs straying on roads would either be shot dead or poisoned."

Policy

Indian national policy since Decem-ber 1997 has been to avoid killing street dogs, but street pigs tend to be killed by any means available, with little or no recognition that pigs who survive and escape will then breed back up to the carrying capacity of the habitat.

But in at least one community, officials have reportedly interpreted the national dog policy as pertaining to pigs as well.

"Hundreds of families who live on the river banks" now rear pigs near the Budhan Sandhai marketplace, in Pallipalayam, on the River Cauvery, reported The Hindu in August 2006. "Absence of toilets has forced the residents to depend on the river banks. This is an ideal situation for the pigs to grow," The Hindu explained. "Municipal officials say they have warned the residents many times not to rear pigs," The Hindu continued. "On many occasions they have also captured the pigs. However, they released them a few days later. Officials say they are not able to kill the pigs. They cite a law that prevents killing animals, and they don't have the facilities to sterilize the captured pigs."

An October 2006 update downsized the human population in the primary pig habitat to 80 families, most of whom are not pig herders. Along with others in the vicinity, The Hindu said, "they want the civic body to construct public convenience facilities, want bathrooms, want the municipality to clear garbage on a regular basis and go in for solid waste management, and want the civic body to deal with the pig menace."

Recognizing that the street pig problem results ultimately from deficient refuse disposal, Hyderabad municipal commissioner Sanjay Jagu in October 2006 coupled an order to staff to remove pigs from the streets with orders to "clear debris on a priority basis," and "construct public toilets to maintain hygiene," The Hindu reported.

"The health wing was asked to carry out door-to-door collection of garbage by arranging tricycles, and to bring commercial establishments under a bulk garbage removal system," The Hindu continued. "Jaju also requested residents to cooperate by not dumping garbage on the roads."
--Merritt Clifton