Dealing with Dogs

As you may have realised I am a bit of a dog lover but I am especially fond of my lovely Lab and her two side kicks- local Indian strays - who have adopted us and we them.

French blonde demoiselle called Tara

However I am not unaware of the wider issue and one of the questions I have always asked myself is why are there so many dogs ? Why are they somehow all tolerated and fed ? Is this part of the Hindu faith that you are not allowed to kill other life ?One web site http://www.karmayog.com/dogs/religiousattitude.htm put it as follows :

Buddhists / Jains: no animal to be killed for whatever reason, even sterilisation not desirable / acceptable
Hindus - veg ones: God is in every living being, so not ok to kill
Parsis: 600 lashes for killing a stray dog; so not ok to kill

Astute Indian Stray called Chini (Tara's personal trainer)

If that is the case why are there no cats ? You very rarely see cats in Delhi whereas every shop, shopping precinct, road and rubbish tip is full of stray dogs, napping, foraging or just socializing with other dogs in the area.

One of the thousands of strays having a rest

Last night was a beautiful evening and having spent part of the day at home I thought it would be nice to go out for a walk so I put the dog in the car and set off. I parked where the road was quiet and off we went. I now carry a stick with me because on a similar walk some months ago with my mother in law a stray dog who seeemed to be approaching Tara, suddenly turned on my mother in law and bit her and of course we immediately got her a set of rabies injections. A bit of a shock for a 90 year old however hardy and sprightly she might be. Rabies is endemic in India and if you have a pet or a tendency to go out walking or children who might be tempted to pet a dog then being vaccinated is probably a good idea. A statistic albeit from 2008 said:

"A person is bitten every 2 seconds, and someone dies from rabies every 30 minutes. The annual number of person-days lost because of animal bites is 38 million, and the cost of post-bite treatment is about $25 million."

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2244675

This is a paper I found on the Internet but the numbers seem too shocking to be true. Whatever the numbers I know that this is a serious one.

So stick in hand we set off and as we walked past a field a whole pack of strays started barking and being aggessive. Tara who has the capacity to ignore them all, was just in front, so I shooed them away and waved my stick and walked on. On the way back however unbeknown to me, but typically so for my fat dog, she sat down on the corner, as if to say
"If you think I am going the long way round, think again because I am not coming !" I had walked on ahead a little lost in thought and taking in the lovely chanting from the sikh gudwara in our neighbourhood and then the next thing I know one of the pack comes charging up and attempts to take a bite out of Tara's back. She  is moulting mercifully so the stray went off with a pack of Tara's hair in his mouth and did not break the skin. I barely had time to react and by the time I had turned around and chased it the damage had been done.

How to cool off  by YOGI

I am not scared of venturing into areas with dogs but they are a menace and everyone needs to be aware of them. Vaccinating your pets and your family is sound advice in this country.  They say dogs get hot in the hot weather like we do but they cant take their coat off so tempers fry and fly !