'It will be an explosion of zoonotic diseases from these places.'
'People will not be able to live or work for kilometres around these places where thousands of street dogs are kept.'
At a time when public concern over stray dog attacks is at a high, animal welfare expert Gauri Maulekhi offers a sobering and science-backed perspective on the issue.
In a candid conversation with Syed Firdaus Ashraf/Rediff, Maulekhi, a long-standing advocate for humane animal policies, challenges the prevailing narrative linking all dog bite cases to street dogs.
Citing discrepancies in government data collection and the failure to distinguish between pet and stray dog incidents, she warns that reactionary decisions -- such as removing all street dogs -- could trigger a far greater public health crisis.
Mahatma Gandhi believed that the greatness and moral progress of a nation can be judged by how it treats its animals. In this context, what message does the Supreme Court verdict on stray dogs to send them to shelters, say about animal welfare in India?
The order of the honourable Supreme Court, sadly, is contrary to all of these values and policies, but we are grateful that the honourable Supreme Court is reviewing the matter and we are hopeful that the injustice will be corrected.
In one of your tweets, you wrote about segregating pet versus street dog bites, so why was it not done earlier?
I don't know about dog lovers or dog haters, but it is basically a very scientific process to collect data on which policies are based. Now if that data collection is faulty, then your policies will be faulty.
Hence, the capturing of data at the government medical hospitals where post-exposure rabies vaccines are dispensed was something that had been questioned for a long time, not only by the central government, but also by several state governments.
There are surveys that were conducted in some states, including Kerala, where it was found that most of these dog bites are being reported to medical institutions on account of pet dog bites, but it was not being captured like that in medical hospitals.
Therefore, first the UP government and then the central government raised concerns about it and now they have floated a proforma because these numbers are hugely inflated.
Does it mean the pet dogs and stray dogs bite cases need to be segregated?
More and more people are keeping Rottweilers and Bully Kuttas and other ferocious dogs as pets, and more and more people are getting more aware about post-exposure rabies vaccination.
So these cases are turning up at medical hospitals, which should not be attributed to stray dogs in the first place.
But it just so happened that till date, nobody had checked it.
Thankfully, the ministry of health and family welfare saw this discrepancy and has asked for states to give progress reports in that format.
However, most states have still not started collecting data in the same manner.
Therefore, we are still waiting for the Directorate General of Health Services (DGHS) order to trickle down to the last mile, which is the medical institution which needs to collect.
For instance, in Delhi, it is only 15 days ago that they even learnt about the DGHS' order. When we gave it to them, they did not even know about it.
Safdarjung (hospital) is still putting dog bite for somebody who's asking for a post-exposure rabies vaccine for a rat bite, for instance. We're still putting dog bite and everything is being attributed to street dogs.
Does it mean stray dogs are being targeted for no reason?
I will give you another example. Now, for instance, if 100 doses have been dispensed, 50 doses would be for pet dogs, at least 50. There could actually be more.
Moreover, for every single dog bite you need five doses (of the rabies vaccine). So for every successive dose, one dog bite is being recorded, which means actual street dog bites may have been just 10, but it's being inflated like 10 times.
That is why the numbers seem so scary. Everybody is just picking up the number of vials for post-exposure rabies dispensed and they're running with it saying street dogs bite. This makes no sense whatsoever.
Is it not true that in 2024 alone, 37.2 lakh dog bite cases were reported in India? This headline really scares you and therefore people get very apprehensive.
It is a scary headline, but it is an incorrect number. I would encourage journalists to go to these hospitals and ask whether they are collecting the data in the format provided by DGHS or not.
Because that format not only distinguishes between pet dog and street dog, it also makes sure that duplicity doesn't happen. That one bite, five successive doses, are not recorded as five different dog bites.
And if it is any other animal bite, there's a column for that also, so that it doesn't get attributed to street dogs again. So, the format given by DGHS is very clear. It's a sad thing that the medical institutions of our country are not following it.
How do you respond to critics who say it should not come at the cost of human lives?
It is not save this one or that. It is that we have to create a balance. And we have to ensure that in trying to solve a problem, we don't create a bigger problem for ourselves.
Now, a simplistic solution to this will only be extremely counterproductive and will jeopardise human life.
If we remove all dogs and put them in ghettos and concentration camps, it will be a public health nightmare. It will be an explosion of zoonotic diseases from these places.
People will not be able to live or work for kilometres around these places where thousands of street dogs are kept.
These are all sounding very good in theory, that take all the dogs away and put them somewhere. But they just will be a biohazard for the people living in any city.
Was there any scientific thought given by a government institution to putting all stray dogs in shelters?
Scientific thought is given when stakeholders are involved, where science is studied, where comments are invited from all kinds of stakeholders and bodies.
This exercise happened while the animal birth control rules 2023 were made.
This exercise happened when the national action plan on rabies eradication was prepared by the National Centre for Disease Control, ministry of health and family welfare. And all of them came to the conclusion that animal birth control rules and thorough vaccination are the only way to go forward.
Unfortunately, when the Supreme Court heard the matter, it rejected all intervention applications and implement applications and only heard the amicus curiae who was -- what should I say, without meaning to be rude -- ill-informed on any of these scientific facts.
The government, however, had taken everything into consideration while framing the policy. However, the due process was not followed when the order was pronounced in court.
Who should be blamed or held accountable for not enforcing animal birth control rules?
The biggest loophole in the animal birth control rules in 2023 is that the incharge of veterinary interventions with street dogs, that is, their surgical sterilisation and vaccination, was left to urban local bodies or local authorities.
Now, local authorities have limited understanding of how to handle veterinary intervention.
Most of them don't have the infrastructure and a large number of local authorities don't even have a veterinary section. Or the wherewithal.
So, urban local bodies like municipal corporations sometimes would venture into animal birth control programmes. But rural local bodies like gram panchayats and zilla panchayats would not even have the understanding or wherewithal at all, anywhere in the country, to control street dog population.
So, leaving this subject to urban development and panchayati raj departments and holding them accountable was primarily the fault of this policy.
This should have been vested in the animal husbandry department only, because they have veterinary hospitals across the country. They have the largest pool of veterinarians in the country.
They should have been held in charge of these surgical interventions and not the urban development, you know, local authorities, because local authorities are, for one, there is too much multiplicity. There are thousands of local authorities, tens of thousands. So, a standardised programme is not even possible across the country.
Moreover, reporting is a nightmare with local authorities, while with state animal husbandry departments, which have hospitals in rural, urban areas, cantonment areas, hill areas, desert areas all over the country, they have hospitals. And they report to the state government. It would have been a very straightforward programme.
The Supreme Court judgment came after Chhavi Sharma's tragic death due to stray dog bite. This is the reason why many people agree with the order to send street dogs to shelter homes.
We don't live in Afghanistan. We live in the Republic of India, right? We don't do eye for an eye. We don't say, you know, if one anecdotal case has happened, however unfortunate it may be, that now tens of lakhs of lives will have to be lost.
And we would basically create a bigger nightmare for ourselves than resolve the situation and ensure that more children are not succumbing to the same fate.
Now, while I say that this anecdotal example was incorrect and the cause of death was not verified as rabies, I am told it was not rabies.
But even if it were rabies, one anecdotal example should not determine the policy of the country. That is the surest way of failing the Indian population.
Moreover, like I said, it's a reactive decision rather than a proactive decision. So when we react to situations and we say an eye for an eye and 10 lakh lives because one child has lost his life, we will create a bigger problem for ourselves.
All solutions, policies have to be made with dispassion and not in a rage, not in anger, not as a reaction, but have to be made dispassionately and based on science.
After having studied the consequences of such steps that we are laying down for the country. It should not basically create a bigger monster than we can't deal with.
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