Packs of street dogs charging at pedestrians and moving vehicles has become a persistent problem facing the residents of Chennai in the last few months.
While activists call for a systematic approach to animal birth control, the Greater Chennai Corporation (GCC) has not consolidated the number of community dogs since 2018.
Activists say the first step in preventing the proliferation of dogs is to ascertain their number. However, according to an official, the Corporation has no immediate plans to do this. The proposal was still in planning stage and the civic body hopes to rope in non-governmental organisations to assist it in the exercise.
J. Kamal Hussain, chief veterinary officer, GCC, said as per the 2018 census, there were 19,000 female dogs and the current estimate of the community dog number was arrived at by calculating the reproductive cycles of dogs and the number of birth control surgeries performed.
Calling for a stated objective to control the dog numbers, Abi T. Vanak, Director for the Centre for Policy Design, Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and Environment (ATREE), said it was important for local bodies to estimate the number of dogs in the city and target the proportion of dogs that had to be sterilised. “Absolute numbers are meaningless. What is the denominator?” he questioned.
Mr. Vanak suggested that to begin with, dogs that exhibited aggressive behaviour need to be identified and sheltered; urban local bodies must bring in a pet licensing policy and actively encourage adoption programmes.
The GCC’s current method of capturing and performing the animal birth control surgery involved a dog-catching vehicle in all 15 zones which can hold up to five dogs per vehicle as well as a special vehicle. “There is no monthly neutering target as we mostly work based on complaints of dog bites and an average of 1,500 surgeries are performed every month across all our ABC centres”, said Mr. Husain.
According to Arun Prasanna, founder, People for Cattle in India (PCFI), the number of dogs sterilised under the animal birth control (ABC) programme annually was less. “There are easily more than 1.5 lakh dogs in Chennai. Sterilising hardly 10% of them is not enough,” he said. “By sterilising dogs haphazardly, the problem is not even addressed, let alone solved,” he said.
(With inputs from Malavika Ramakrishnan)
