The issue of stray dogs is a pressing issue that’s usually ignored by most of us until it quite literally comes to bite us in the arse. The problem was brought into the limelight due to the recently held G20 in Delhi, during which dogs were forcefully captured. Several good samaritans saw the authorities in action and shot videos of the cruel process of capturing these dogs, which have been circulating throughout social media, calling for an end to such cruelty.
Whether or not those actions were right or wrong, necessary or unnecessary, are not the questions I’m going to be discussing in this post. The question that I call attention to is why is the condition of strays in India so poor in the first place that such extreme measures have to be undertaken in the first place.
I’ve always been a stereotypical dog person, from begging my parents to get us a dog to bringing home strays – only to be denied the right to keep them again and again – I’ve been through it all. But there was one dog-related incident that had quite an impact on me.
This was back in 2020; when the whole world shut down, I chose to use the extra free time to start feeding strays. If any of you have fed dogs before, you know how easily they befriend you. The immense wagging of their tails the moment they smell your presence and their following you around like bodyguards become daily sights. This was also when I realised that these dogs, albeit unintentionally, can cause certain problems for people. Where I live, a few stray dogs would often defecate in front of the doors of some apartments or tear through a bike’s seat in the parking lot. These were acts that were big hindrances for these people and despite my dog-loving nature, I could see that there were two sides to the coin. These people often demanded that these dogs be thrown out of our colony, and people like me retaliated. A day came when perhaps one of such people could tolerate it no more and decided to take things into their own hands. The strays I had served food with love for so long were served chicken tainted with poison. When morning came, the pits of painful vomit along with the canine corpses with scars of foamy mouths were seen and people slowly joined the pieces to realise exactly what had happened. A heartbreaking sight for some and a breath of relief for others, most of the dogs were dead. The one survivor was immensely sick and taken to a vet. Slightly later, it was discovered in the ruins of an unconstructed house that there wasn’t just one survivor, but a whole litter of them. One of the dogs who had been killed had literally given birth a day ago; so dogs weren’t just killed, newborn babies had also been orphaned.
These tiny day-old pups, barely the size of a palm, did not have a lot of hope. Puppies this young are vulnerable, without being able to move properly, not possessing 3 of their senses (they can only feel touch and taste at this stage), and not even being able to defecate on their own, their growth and survival are completely dependent upon their mother. And these puppies weren’t just devoid of their sight, smell, and hearing, but were also of a mother. With a blind hope to save them, some of us adopted and took care of them. One of them came to me: a black-and-white blend of cuteness. But hope isn’t enough to save a life, and one by one the pups died. The one that I had with me somehow kept fighting longer than the rest, strengthening my hope that she’d make it. I gave her no name as I was a little afraid that it’d hurt more if / when she died if I had given her a name, but we referred to her as ‘baby’. She had to be fed tiny droplets of a milk replacement with a feeder every two hours or so, taking away much of my sleep, but in return bringing a purpose to my life. I remember all my feelings of fatigue and stress melting away when my grandmother told me “tumhare jaiso ka bhagwaan bahot bhala karta hai”.
Life like this went on for a week or two, with me setting a long chain of timers separated by 2 hours and covering a warm bottle of water with a sock as a prosthetic mother for the puppy to cuddle with. Until one day as I held her in my palm to feed her the milk replacement, her neck all of a sudden dropped as if she were a puppet and the string holding the head up was cut. She was no more. I wrote a poem about how I was feeling in the days after this, and although I was definitely not a good poet back then, I suppose I couldn’t do the act of explaining how it felt better than the 2020 unpoetic self of me did:
I was all alone,
I used to think that my life was purposeless,
And then came that day,
When i found you,
Tiny and helpless,
I thought you needed me,
So i took you in,
It wasn’t easy,
It really wasn’t,
But every discomfort came after;
after, you.
–
I wasn’t alone,
My life finally had a purpose,
And I’d do anything to fulfil it,
Because i found you,
tiny and cute,
Full of life.
–
And then came that day,
The day a daughter,
my daughter,
died in my hands,
little and moribund,
gasping for air,
you were no more;
turns out,
i was the one who needed you,
for without you,
I’m all alone,
and my life is purposeless.
I reckon I’ll end this post here, I wanted this post to include some statistics and what we can do as citizens to help the state of dogs but it’s already long enough, so I’ve decided to do that in a second part. Thank you for reading this, and I hope to see you again in the next post.