http://www.vagchiblog.blogspot.com
A dogfight every
fifteen minutes. That seems to be the standard in our parts. The fights generally
commence at night-fall and continue through the night. Maybe, the periodicity
changes and the frequency comes down, but the fights continue till the dogs get
tired and fall off to sleep.
Our Ridge Road
on the Idgah Hills overlooks the government offices of the district. These have
been there since the Nawabi era. Each of these offices has a chowkidar and
scores of lower level staff residing on the premises. These people have a
battery of dogs, presumably to help them carry out their duties of watch and
ward. Dogs, after all, are known as the best friends (of humans) and affection
is lavished on them to keep them emotionally attached to those who care for
them.
But when a fight
commences all hell breaks loose and it is a kind of a no-holds-barred fight.
Fierce barking by multiple dogs rents the air for seemingly interminable
minutes but then the whole thing kind of collapses. Everything becomes normal
and quietude prevails as if nothing had ever happened. This lasts for around a
quarter hour at the mosr and at the end of which the barking and snarling
re-commences against an intruder – canine or even a human – only to subside
again till the cycle of barking and vicious snarling commences again. This goes
on till well past midnight when, tired of the noise, we aged mortals fall
asleep. But many a time snatches of canine fury can be heard even late in the
night or at early hours of the mornings.
Call them stray
dogs if you will, but to my mind they are not stray. They are always in a group
– occupying our universe, the urban human universe. Photographs have appeared
of these groups having a field day in the so-called New Market which now, in
fact, is not so new being half a century old. I have myself seen a huge assemblage of them near our Taj Mahal in
Shahjehanabad while going late in the evening to the station to catch a train.
Even the taxiwala, a local Muslim who used to ply a lone taxi then, confessed
that he had never seen such a “nazaara” before. That was around ten years ago;
since then their numbers have grown manifold.
Their numbers
had to move northwards as the effort to control dog population failed. The
phenomenon has a close resemblance with the country’s efforts to control the
human population. After the infamous Emergency of the 1970s, during which Late
Sanjay Gandhi ham-handedly tried to impose birth control, family planning
became a dirty word. After around two dark years the new minister in-charge
wanted to have nothing to do with family planning and even changed the name of
the ministry, replacing the word “planning” with “welfare”. The matter of
controlling population was put on the back burner and in the next 40 years the
country’s population doubled without anybody getting wise about it; hitting a
billion much before it was anticipated.
So like humans
dogs continue to breed, to use a Churchillian phrase, “like rabbits” or in our
context, shall we say, like dogs – littering like mad every year. Indian
streets are full of them and at night they congregate on the spacious squares
now free of rotaries to raise merry hell. Time was when the municipal
corporations used to make sincere efforts to control their population. Their
would be dog catchers roaming the streets to catch the stray ones, yes, really
the stray ones and probably put them in a dog house or liquidate them.
Those days are
gone. Now it is more humane way of controlling their growth – by neutering
them. An admirable way to achieve the objective only if it were effective! When
the wherewithal to carry out the process is not in accordance with the needs,
the effort is bound to fail. Obviously, the municipal staff all the time find
themselves as losers as against the burgeoning dog population. The inadequacy
of financial, technical, and human resources forces them to chase the
unachievable target - that of besting the growth in dog numbers.
That is how we get to a situation of
proliferating dogs that now have become kind of maneaters. A few months back a
report from far away Thiruvanantpuram in Kerala said stray dogs made a meal of
an elderly woman. In Bhopal one has seen reports of infants being attacked by
stray and violent dogs. Obviously, when there are too many of them there isn’t
enough food to go round for all of them. So, they attack the old and infirm or
hapless infants. Clever, aren’t they?
The crux of the
problem is that even if our humane methods fail leaving the urbanites exposed
to the increasing dangers originating from the canines nothing drastic can be
done to liquidate them. That is the government’s policy. Blue bulls and wild boars
can be culled but no, not urban stray dogs. The blue bulls and wild boars
destroy crops and cause losses to the farmers who have that precious thing
called votes. Hence blue bulls and wild boars have become dispensible much
against the laws relating to protection of wild life. Mercifully, the license
to kill has not been extended to pachyderms who too are destroyers of crops.
Urbanites, unlike the farmers, are a diffused
community and hence can be allowed to remain exposed to the canine threat or
made to bear the night long barks. Theirs generally are middleclass votes which
can be foregone as they do not matter much in electoral equations.
So, while the
dogs bark and snarl you have to grin and bear it as no prospects are in sight
of mitigation of the problem. A day might soon come when the cities are taken
over by dogs and, fearful of them. humans are forced to move into the wild
*Photor from internet.
No comments:
Post a Comment