Love for stray dogs vs public safety: Why India needs a real solution now

India Today

a day ago

The year is 1997. It is 7:15 PM in Dewas, an industrial town in western Madhya Pradesh. Thanks to the solitary timezone our country follows, there is enough daylight. I am out on a stroll with my mother, maybe to visit someone. I can't recall who because we never ended up visiting them. Why? You will soon figure it out.There was a bakery at the bend, famous for its aloo patties, a favourite post-cricket snack of the colony kids. It costs Rs 5 per piece, with complimentary red sauce, claimed to be tomato ketchup. The bakery owner never gave bills or receipts for any purchases.advertisement'Kya karoge bill ka?' he would humour. Honestly, until I moved to a metro, I never knew you could receive bills for purchasing grocery items.
Sometimes, the baker would reheat three-day-old patties in a bulb-operated oven to feed the red-sauce-addicted kids. We wouldn't notice, since he would put extra sauce. To atone for all the tax theft and deceit, he would feed the stray dogs around. It's a feature in India: often, people with a lot of black money will have a religious hymn as their ringtone or a deity as their phone wallpaper. The corrupt often seek refuge in religion or performative kindness as insurance against bad luck, also known as the Income Tax Department.Nevertheless, the cunning baker's largesse ensured a battery of well-fed dogs around the bakery. I was aware of this sensitive area. Hence, I usually avoid wearing revealing clothes, especially the ones which expose my calf muscles to the aloo patties-fed canines.As I approached them, the first thing I did was to clench my butt, just look ahead, walk briskly, while not trying to run, never trying to look the dog in the eye, and maybe hum a song. To somehow prove you are not a threat, not someone who is willing to share their food, or try to mediate in their fight with some trade deals. Just. Be. A. Non. Entity.Maybe my calf muscles were too tempting. Two of them started growling and pacing cautiously toward me. Now, this is a red flag in the stray-dog escape manual - it means you are about to be attacked. My mother, meanwhile, had picked up a rock to pretend to throw at them, hoping to shoo them away. Cardinal mistake. One of them leapt and punctured my thigh with its fangs.Dog bites are painful, but more than that, they are severely traumatic. The moment an animal attacks you, your body reacts like an animal. Darwinian survival theories suddenly come to the fore. Your brain convinces you that you will be eaten very shortly. Such trauma is so long-lasting that you can write a detailed column about it 28 years later.I am not a dog parent, but I have immense respect for the species - probably the closest ally to humans in the entire animal kingdom, often even a substitute for human presence in one's life. A forever kid, surprising you with its kindness and loyalty every passing day. 'Oh, you know what he did today,' you share joyously with your partner.advertisementA dog never really grows up mentally - to be cunning, to lose its innocence - like children eventually do. I say this as the parent of a growing toddler. At the same time, I also understand people who are wary of dogs.Love for dogs is usually generational. It's inherited in most cases. If one has grown up with a dog at home, it will be natural for that person to be a dog lover for life. A natural extension of this is love for stray dogs. By nature, dogs are loyal to their master.To explain it in mathematics, it's like a function f(x) in differential calculus. It can be one-to-one, many-to-one, but never one-to-many. To simplify, a dog can be super loyal to its human parent, and the parent would love the dog too (one-to-one). Many others can love your dog (many-to-one), but the dog won't be as charitable or loving to many others or strangers (one-to-many). The one-to-one function is so strong that it ignores the absence of one-to-many. We have to curb the access of one dog to many humans. That's the core of it. Keep it one-to-one. And that's where the stray dog situation comes in.advertisementThere are 37 lakh reported dog bites every year, often in the poorest of gullies, with small children being the most frequent victims. That alone shows there is a problem. Throwing dogs into shelters, which are virtually non-existent, is not the optimal solution. But the absence of a fair solution should not make us forget the problem. We cannot be satisfied with the status quo. Nobody should have to hum a song and pray to their subscribed deity to escape a dog bite and the ensuing trauma, including that small kid in Malwa, 28 years ago.(Abhishek Asthana is the founder of a creative agency – GingerMonkey. He tweets as @GabbbarSingh)- Ends(Views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author)Must Watch