The Hindu : Lokayukta lambasts animal welfare bodies

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, Mar 12, 2003

Southern States

Southern States - Karnataka

Lokayukta lambasts animal welfare bodies

By Our Staff Reporter

BANGALORE March 11. The Lokayukta, Justice N.Venkatachala, has lambasted animal welfare organisations, particularly those engaged in animal birth control, which oppose putting dogs to sleep.

Speaking about the high incidence of rabies in the country in his 70-page report to the Government after a hearing on a petition filed by Stray Dog Free Bangalore, he has said: "The so-called stray dog lovers in our country, most of whom are fortunate enough to move about in their limousines, may not try to create the wrong impression on the minds of gullible poor people that no harm could come to human beings living and moving about in the City by its stray dogs, as they have sought to do with me.''

Referring to a letter written to the Bangalore Mahanagara Palike (BMP) by a Union Minister against killing of dogs, Mr. Venkatachala has said that it not only provided an excuse to the BMP authorities to cover up their failures but also was used for "dolling out public money to their favourite organisations in the guise of implementing animal birth control.''

While compassion and sympathy for dogs were unquestionable and were dear to every human being, unleashing of terror by the authorities and the elite by promoting the Animal Birth Control programme and propagating stray dog menace was a clear case of misplaced zeal for dogs at the expense of human beings, he said.

``In fact, street dogs under the birth control programme receive modern vaccine (at public cost) whereas dog-bitten human victims receive outdated sheep brain vaccine. This is against any tenets of philosophy, reason, and virtue and must not happen in any civilised society.''

He quotes an expert who says that dogs are vectors of rabies and that India is the only country where there are animal activists advocating the existence of stray dogs at the risk of human lives.

He also quoted a letter written by the Human Rights Commission to a Pune-based organisation commending the clause for destruction of street dogs.

Mr. Venkatachala has pointed out that F. X. Meslin, chief of a Geneva-based Rabies Division of the World Health Organisation, believed that the animal birth control programme had not stabilised the dog population in India. According to Mr. Meslin, even an international animal welfare organisation such as the World Society for Protection of Animals did not oppose shooting and "euthanasia'' to tackle the problem.

He wonders if the people, who are pleading for saving stray and ownerless dogs in the country, are working for the rabies vaccine manufacturing companies.

Stating that the victims of dog bite were the poor or the City's pavement dwellers, he says that none of them appears to belong to the elite class. Animal lovers who appeared before him during the hearing, "did not appear to be people who could have gone on any day close to such dogs and seen them in close proximity, for the very close look at them would have probably made them realise the imminent danger posed by them to the lives of our people.''

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