Leh, India — By day they lay sprawled out asleep in the shade, only getting up every now and then to munch on some trash. By night they spring to life, turning the streets into a high-energy doggie dance party. A constant soundtrack of barking, yelping, and whining plays from dusk to dawn. Some dogs run about solo while others form packs and roam the streets, marking their territory wherever they go like a graffiti crew tagging an alley.
In this city of 30,000 people there must be a few thousand dogs, which is pretty typical of Indian cities. Some are rabid, though the infection rate is less than one percent, according to local NGOs working to sterilize the stray population. People do get bitten on a fairly regular basis, and they have to get a series of nasty rabies vaccinations that can cause nausea and a general malaise. For those not lucky enough to get treatment, the disease is usually fatal.
Just as I wrote that last paragraph, a friend walked into the bakery where I’m sitting. She told me a gruesome story about how she’d been mauled by two dogs in broad daylight the other day. Lifting her skirt, she showed me the wounds on her legs. She’d gone for the rabies vaccinations, which were painful and made her nauseous. Luckily, she got the vaccine early enough so she should be fine.
The synchronicity of this event stunned me. Not only was I writing about dogs in Leh at the very moment when she came in and told me she’d been bitten by dogs in Leh, but we’d previously talked at length about dogs. I’d told her that getting bitten by a dog and catching rabies was my major fear in coming to India. Before I left home, my travel doctor warned me about the increased risk I would be taking by spending a lot of time in rural areas. “Be aggressive,” he told me in a loud, stern voice, “and use a stick.” OK. It sounded excessive, but what did I know. He told me the rabies rate among dogs was 10 percent, which made me nervous (I later found out the rate was not that high in the area where I’m staying.).
Sterilization is the answer for some municipalities that want to keep their dog population in check. In a country where millions of people live in slums, without access to clean water and food, the importance of animal life is put into perspective. Judging by the strays’ leanness, they don’t eat much. Sometimes the ragged fur on their diseased bodies is half fallen off.. Some dogs walk with a limp or can barely walk at all.
Should dogs be culled? That has been the answer for some villages. You can walk through entire villages without seeing a single stray. They’ve either been killed or transported elsewhere. Culling is their answer to the “problem.” But don’t dogs have equal rights to the public streets, let alone equal rights to live? Some towns see it that way. For other towns, the answer lies somewhere in between.
India is unlike the West, where dogs eat better and have better access to health care and other amenities than much of the world’s human population. In India, it makes sense that dogs are not treated like royalty. But that does not mean they don’t have rights.
According to biocentrists, animals have the same inherent value as humans and possess an equal right to life. Anthropocentrists, on the other hand, would argue that humans are at the centre of the universe and thus can dominate animals. On a practical level, this environmental ethics question boils down to a question of need. Do we need to sterilize or cull dogs? Is their presence killing us? If so, how many should we kill? If one human dies from rabies per month, does that mean 100 dogs should die?
Humans bred dogs into domestication; can we now blame strays for wanting to feed off our waste? In tinkering with the natural order, we sucked the wild instinct out of dogs, who now look to us as providers. Some strays decide to cast off the shackles of city living to go fend for themselves in the wild. Of these, some are able to reconnect with their wildness and become feral, while others retreat to the city, where they may end up sterilized or killed.
As I look out the window of the Gesmo bakery, I see four brownish-yellow dogs sprawled on the entrance steps. One is curled up in a perfect “U” shape from head to tail. Another is lying belly up, its hind legs thrust straight up into the air. They all look so similar that they could be a family. Related or not, they look at peace. These streets are as much theirs as ours.
