3 days ago
What Mumbai can teach Delhi about managing its street dog population
Raju, a chaiwala at Churchgate Reclamation in Mumbai, would call us whenever his beloved Jaggu and Rani were unwell. Though his earnings were meagre, he would feed the dogs and look after them.
A few metres away, the valet at a restaurant at the Eros theatre would look after Chickoo, Julie and Eros. In winters, he would cover Chickoo with a makeshift sweater made from a gunny bag. It was because of these local caretaker heroes that organisations like The Welfare of Stray Dogs could access the Jaggus and Ranis for their sterilisation, vaccination and treatment.
Today, there is a visible decrease in Mumbai's street dog population. This is due to a consistent and targeted area-wise sterilisation programme by many animal welfare organisations in conjunction with the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation's veterinary department. The latest figures of the street dog population show that it has gone down by around 5% over the last 10 years – a significant achievement for the city.
Deaths caused by rabies too have gone down drastically from the pre-1994 culling era. This progress is due a multipronged approach: an annual rabies mass vaccination programme, sustained education and awareness initiatives carried out in schools – especially public schools – on dog-bite and rabies prevention, as well as the availability of free post-bite vaccinations in municipal hospitals.
Thus, it's been a drastic improvement from 20 years ago when one saw more street dogs – both visible packs and numerous puppies. In those days, one had to convince people who looked after the street dogs to take the canines away for sterilisation.
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On-site first aid programmes and re-vaccination drives coupled with awareness programmes helped us build the trust of the community. You also need to compare today's situation with the times when lakhs of street dogs were killed for over 150 years without any reduction in dog population or rabies.
Killing was a tool of removal, which is one of the futile solutions purported today. Removal does not help achieve the objectives of reduction of the street dog population. As street dogs are territorial, removal creates a vacuum that gets readily filled by dogs from neighbouring areas. This creates an unstable, constantly changing and rapidly multiplying street dog population.
What you have in Mumbai today is a stable and, in many areas, a decreasing, non-rabid street dog population.
Community participation has played a vital role. The people who feed community animals and care for them are doing a great service to make them more accessible when the BMC or non-governmental organisation van comes to catch them for sterilisation or for vaccination against rabies. There are now more people adopting street dogs, now affectionately called Indies.
The reasons for this shift are varied – from greater awareness about the cruelty of 'puppy mills' to the recognition of the many advantages of keeping an Indie: adaptability, natural resilience and intelligence.
The success of Mumbai's sustained street dog sterilisation efforts is evident not only in official data but also in the everyday scenes of the city, where puppies and pregnant dogs have become rarer than before. Yet, this achievement has brought an unintended shift in the urban balance: a marked increase in the street cat population.
With fewer dogs to compete for space or deter them, the cat population has increased. Recognising the need to address this emerging challenge, NGOs have already launched mass cat sterilisation programmes, aiming at maintaining the city's hard-won progress in humane animal population control while preserving the ecological balance.
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