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ESSENTIAL DESTINATIONS
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MONTH: June 2007
70 years of missing the link
CHENNAI--Non-recognition
of the relationship between Indian street dog purges and monkey invasions
is no new phenomenon--and not only Indians have failed to observe it.
Separate articles on page 22 of the July 1938 edition of the National Humane Review, published by the American Humane Association, detailed both a dog pogrom in Chennai, then called Madras, and the industry of shipping monkeys to U.S. laboratories that had emerged in several leading Indian cities.
Neither the British correspondents who
furnished the information nor the Americans who wrote the articles appeared
to be aware that one practice might be fueling the other.
"Stray dogs are a problem in India,
as in our own country," the editors observed, "and city handling
in India is as revolting as in many American cities. Through the endeavors
of the Madras SPCA, electrocution has taken the place of clubbing dogs
to deathSıThat the practices of city dog catchers are much the same the
world over is indicated by a complaint that the dog catchers were taking
only healthy dogs and passing up the diseased ones."
Trying to stop the monkey export trade
was the special concern of a Miss Howard Rice, of Pune. In 1937 she won
a temporary suspension of the traffic during the summer months. The trade
was finally stopped entirely in 1978, through the combined efforts of
the Blue Cross of India and the International Primate Protection League,
but as urban monkeys have proliferated in recent years, political arguments
for reviving it have resurfaced.