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ESSENTIAL DESTINATIONS

MONTH: March 2007

Animal Birth Control is fixing the dogs faster than anti-dog attitudes

by Merritt Clifton

AGRA, AHMEDABAD, BANGALORE, CHENNAI, DELHI, THIRUVANATHAPURAM, VISAKHAPATNAM--The Koramangala pound in Bangalore may have been the quietest location in India having anything to with street dogs in the aftermath of a January 5, 2007 fatal pack attack on a nine-year-old girl named Sridevi.

The Coalition for a Dog-Free Bangalore and similar groups nationwide made Sridevi's death focal to ongoing efforts to reverse the nine-year-old central government commitment to sterilize street dogs instead of killing them. (See guest column on page 7.)

In Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala state, also called Trivandrum, a February 10, 2007 confrontation between dogcatchers capturing dogs for extermination and proponents of the local Animal Birth Control program reportedly burst into violence.

At Koramangala, however, built circa 1934 by the British troops, several hundred dogs rested in low-roofed cement kennels with scarcely a bark. Some awaited sterilization surgery in a clinic where dogs were for 65 years electrocuted. Others were under post-operative observation to avoid infection. Soon they would be returned to the neighborhoods where they were collected.

The unusual quiet of the Koramangala pound may result mostly from the kennels being arranged in single rows, with each front facing the back of another kennel instead of the front of another kennel and an unfamiliar dog staring back. The dogs are housed in compatible pairs whenever possible.
Other ABC headquarters in Bangalore were as noisy as they were busy.

The attractively landscaped Com-passion Unlimited Plus Action hospital and shelter on the Hebbal Veterinary College Campus closely resembles the Help In Suffering facilities in Jaipur, whose ABC program was among the first prominent successes. Both institutions were founded by British expatriate Crystal Rogers (1906-1996). Rogers recruited and trained CUPA core personnel Suparna Ganguly, Shiela Rao, and Sanober Bharucha.

CUPA also manages the Koramangala ABC program and an outpatient clinic.

On February 23, 2007 CUPA hosted World Health Organization chief F.X. Meslin and Animal Welfare Board of India chair R.M. Kharb for the formal debut of new national Rabies Free India campaign, sponsored by the Animal Welfare Board and the federal Ministry of Environment and Forests.

Using an oral vaccine developed especially for street dogs, Rabies Free India, "will be launched in Delhi, Chennai and Bangalore," Ganguly explained to The Hindu. "The vaccine is ensconced in a food pellet. When the dog bites the pellet, the vaccine mixes with the dog's saliva."

After five years of testing, the oral vaccine was recently approved for general use by the Drug Comptroller General of India.

Another Bangalore ABC program operates from the headquarters of Karuna, formerly called the Bangalore SPCA, across a sidestreet from CUPA on the Hebbal campus.

Canvassing adjacent neighborhoods for two hours apiece on foot, I found that up to 70% of the adult dogs in the relatively affluent Karuna sector were sterilized, and more than 90% of all dogs in the poorer and more densely populated CUPA sector, which had about half again as many dogs.

Two half-grown litters belonging to unsterilized bitches living near encampments of migrant construction workers accounted for most of the unsterilized dogs in the Karuna sector. They appeared to be almost chubby, with little competition for local food waste.

There were by contrast only two puppies in the CUPA sector, where only six of the 64 dogs seen lacked an ear notch marking them as sterilized and vaccinated.

A third organization, the Animal Rights Fund, handles the outlying southern parts of Bangalore where Sridevi was killed.

While I was not able to canvas the ARF sector on foot, few dogs were visible from bumper-to-bumper car traffic--except around meat shops, as documented by ARF volunteer Poornima Harish (page 7.)

Officially, Bangalore still has 56,500 street dogs, 21% fewer than seven years ago, after sterilizing more than 25,000 in recent years and killing nearly 6,000 who were deemed potentially dangerous.

Granted three acres of prime lakefront real estate on the edge of Bangalore in 2003, on which to build a new state-of-the-art ABC hospital and adoption center, ARF fought squatters for nearly three years to clear the land for construction, and is still trying to raise the $20,000 estimated construction cost.

The delay, however, may have been indirectly beneficial, in that the ARF design concepts have considerably evolved.

Indian cities lacking effective ABC programs are still killing more than four million dogs per year, chiefly by poisoning, ARF founder Dilip Bafna told ANIMAL PEOPLE.

This is more than twice as many dogs as are killed per year by U.S. animal control agencies and humane societies.

Spectacular successes

The Indian cabinet in December 1997 accepted a unanimous Animal Welfare Board recommendation that ABC should fully replace killing dogs for rabies and nuisance control by 2005. The Blue Cross of India had demonstrated the concept in Chennai since 1964. Successful full-scale ABC programs were already underway in Mumbai and Jaipur as well, but with low visibility, and consequently with relatively little controversy.

The 2005 goal was missed, largely due to thin resources--but where ABC promoters found the means, the results are dramatic. In Bangalore, Chennai, Delhi, Jaipur, Mumbai, and Visakhapatnam, the ratio of street dogs to humans has dropped from about one dog per 10 people, still seen in areas without ABC, to as few as one dog per 160 people.

Ahmedabad, starting later, is fast catching up, with an ABC program entirely funded by the city government, managed by the Animal Help Foundation. Working from city buses converted into mobile clinics, the 28 Animal Help veterinarians sterilized 45,011 dogs in 2006, about 10,000 more animals than were sterilized by any other organization in the world, and are aiming for 60,000 in 2007.

In Delhi, ANIMAL PEOPLE publisher Kim Bartlett observed, "The dog populations are down and the dogs you see are in relatively good shape."

Likewise, in Mumbai, "There are many fewer dogs. I only saw two or three females who seemed to be nursing pups, or had been recently," Bartlett said. "There were some young dogs, but I saw no unweaned puppies. Most of the dogs I saw seemed to be intact males," indicative of a strategy--which ANIMAL PEOPLE has warned Mumbai ABC program planners against--of sterilizing females first, to reduce the dog population fastest. The hazardous aspect of sterilizing females first is that intact male dogs are the most likely to display aggressive behavior, especially when they congregate around the relatively few remaining bitches in heat.

"There is obviously still much sterilization work to be done in Mumbai," Bartlett concluded, "but the situation would seem to be much improved. Nine years ago, it was not possible to look in any direction without seeing one or more dogs. Now you may go blocks without seeing dogs. When you see them, there are likely to be two or more," probably close to a food source.

"There is much less food garbage visible in the streets," Bartlett noted. "We saw a few areas with garbage dumps and there were always dogs there, but not so many" as before the ABC programs started.

Along with sterilizing and vaccinating dogs, the most successful ABC programs emphasize the necessity of removing food waste from the streets, which if not consumed by dogs may encourage population explosions among feral cats, rats, monkeys, and pigs.

While removing garbage seems to have kept monkeys and pigs from replacing dogs in Mumbai, Bartlett observed that cats appear to be numerous and breeding in the vicinity of a major temple.

"In Agra," Bartlett reported, "where there is no ABC program, the situation for dogs is as bad or worse than nine years ago."

In inner Chennai, the Blue Cross of India and People for Animals ABC programs have cut dog numbers to barely more than might be seen in any U.S. city, though the U.S. dogs would not be free-roaming.

Far into the rural districts on the fringe of the sprawling Chennai suburbs, two Blue Cross of India satellite facilities appear to be practicing ABC with remarkable success. Dogs still sprawl in the dust beneath peddlers' carts, but have conspicuous ear notches.

In and around Visakhapatnam, the situation is similar. Seeing a single unsterilized mangy bitch near an outlying temple was cause for a Visakha SPCA volunteer to summon an animal ambulance--while mentioning that the presence of one untreated dog might indicate the presence of others, who possibly followed job seekers in from the countryside.

On January 18, 2007, the government of Tamil Nadu recognized the success of ABC by allocating 5.8 million rupees to sterilize more than 275,000 dogs in 50 cities.

Fighting in the streets

But then there was the Thiruvananthapuram incident, reflecting hostility toward dogs persisting among Indians who fear recurrent rabies outbreaks, accept religious dogma that dogs are unclean, or promote other uses of the ABC funding.

The official version of whatever happened at Thiruvananthapuram, as reported on February 12, 2007 by an anonymous "special correspondent" to The Hindu, was that "The City Corporation sought police assistance after foreign nationals allegedly assaulted a municipal health teamS¹One animal handler who was injured in the incident was hospitalized," the anonymous correspondent claimed, though later accounts clarified that he was only treated as an outpatient for a hand injury.

"The Kovalam police booked four foreign nationals," The Hindu said, "including Avis Lyons of Animal Rights Kerala, on charges of assault and preventing government officials from discharging their duty."
The dogcatchers claimed to have been "accosted and manhandled by a gang lying in wait for them," after they were "lured into a trap."

"I set up Animal Rescue Kerala to implement ABC," responded Lyons in an e-mail to members of the Asian Animal Protect-ion Network, "and have been sterilizing street dogs for four years. ARK has sterilized all of the dogs in the Kovalam area, and has memorandums of understanding with the panchayats (village councils) of Vizinjam and Venganoor, in effect covering the whole of the area.

"In September 2006," Lyons continued, "the mayor of Trivandrum asked if ARK would teach his staff to do ABC. Twenty Trivandrum staff were at ARK for three days learning how to catch, pre-medicate, and handle stray dogs. They then used this information to kill most of the stray dog population in Trivandrum," Lyons alleged, "including dogs sterilized by ARK, and also people's pet dogs. The Trivandrum staff have been caught on camera killing and burying dogs by the roadside," Lyons charged. "I am pursuing court proceedings to stop the killings."

On the night of February 10, 2007, Lyons said, "we saw the dogcatchers' vehicle full of dogs," outside a hotel in an area covered by one of the ARK memorandums of understanding. "We were told that the hotel had called the dogcatchers," Lyons continued. "All of the dogs in the area have been sterilized and vaccinated by ARK. There were 11 dogs in the vehicle, two with collars, one a dachshund very sick with distemper.

"We tried to stop the vehicle, but the police arrived and told us we had to let it go. They would not talk to my advocate, nor would they let me fetch the memorandum of understanding. I asked the policeman in charge for his name, but he hid his badge and then took it off so that I could not see it. By this time the vehicle with the dogs had been driven off, the dogs going to a certain death."
Thiruvananthapuram veterinarian L. Ravikumar asserted that Lyons and friends "have raised a challenge to the rule of law."

Commented Blue Cross of India chair Chinny Krishna, "This is most ironic considering that it is the municipality which is not following the rule of law--namely the ABC rules."

Elaborated A.G. Babu of the SPCA Idukki, "Ravikumar said that he would continue catching and killing stray dogs, and claimed that he would never care for the provisions in the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act 1960 or the ABC rules. He claimed that killing dogs was part of his style of ABC."

Affirmed Roxanne Davur of the Terra Anima Trust in Ooty, "All catchers trained by Animal Rescue Kerala for the ABC programme are now used to catch and kill dogs, and besides their salary are paid an extra twenty rupees for any dog killed."

Thiruvananthapuram health committee chair G.R. Anil reluctantly suspended the dogcatching program amid the exposure, he told The Hindu--and revealed the reason for it.

"Every year, we capture a large number of stray dogs from the wards neighbouring the temple during the run up to the Attukal Pongala festival, which attracts tens of thousands of devotees," Anil said. "There is a likelihood that the devotees will be exposed to marauding stray dogs."