Bengaluru and its great dog-fight

Almost every street has a pack of dogs that holds sway over a territory. Their territorial boundaries keep expanding and shrinking.
Image used for representational purposes only. (Express Illustrations)
Image used for representational purposes only. (Express Illustrations)

BENGALURU: There is a problem in Bengaluru which is eligible to be categorised as ‘Human-Human-Animal-Conflict’ (let’s call it HHAC). It is about the three lakh stray canines ruling the streets of Bengaluru, combining with the massive – and yet, difficult-to-estimate – ‘kindhearted’ population of stray dog-carers, and the conflict chemistry that the latter works up with a section of the population that opposes such ‘kindheartedness’. Yes, ‘HHAC’.

Almost every street has a pack of dogs that holds sway over a territory. Their territorial boundaries keep expanding and shrinking. The males keep pushing frontiers by making inroads into the neighbouring territories. They mark their territory with their strong hind legs to display that all-too-familiar ‘lift-and-spurt’ exercise.

DIt is interesting to observe how similar it is to that of humans (no, not about using those spurts to demarcate territories), who also mark territories over which they hold sway. Humans call it ‘Sovereignty’. No clue what the dogs call it in their woof-woof lingo. But they identify their territorial borders by sniffing the dampness on the base of trees, lamp posts or piles of stones/sand, or wherever, left behind by the leg-lifting adult males from their own packs.

Bengalureans are familiar with the sounds of stray dogs fighting, barking, yelping and howling. It can be heard over long distances in the silent, dark hours. This goes on – day after day, night after night – across Bengaluru, which has 404 stray dogs per square kilometre. That’s a fairly high concentration. This stray canine population coexists with 4,378 humans in that square kilometre.

These 4,000-odd humans in a square kilometre of Bengaluru, are divided in two – those who support feeding of the 404 doggies on the streets, and those who don’t. These two fight it out much like the canine packs do on the streets, albeit differing in levels of civility. Some debate in a civilised manner at an intellectual level; some raise their voices to outdo the other in a display of the signature ‘I knoweth better than thou’ attitude; some come close to blows after they have exhausted their ‘colourfully rich vocabulary’; and some others cross that line and do come to blows, much to the amusement of the target of their exercise – the dogs on the streets, who revel in the justification of their own intra-canine fights. The canines are similar to humans in this, too!

Now, imagine the intensity of conflict that we are being introduced to as ‘HHAC’ on the streets of Bengaluru.

This ongoing conflict has the authorities in a bind. On the face of it, neither side appears to be in the wrong. The stray dog-feeders are doing their bit to help the canines on the streets survive. But that survival sees packs of dogs fighting with each other for territorial dominance or increasing their own packs. It’s not restricted to that. Dogs have their own temperament and aggression levels. It is not rare for dogs to attack humans, especially kids on the roads. Several such cases are on record, which include deaths among children. This gets the goat of those opposing the feeders. That completes the conflict equation.

Conflicts are meant to be resolved. But this one conflict is seeing no end. It is because we don’t seem to want a solution. Had we Indians not fallen for adopting everything foreign – like we do in almost every other domain – probably this problem wouldn’t have existed. Most dog-lovers go for exotic breeds to adopt, and make them their family members. The poor, old Indie is left on the streets, copulating and increasing in numbers, and targeted with love and hate in the great conflict that is the ‘HHAC’. Bengaluru is in the midst of a huge dog-fight, a solution for which remains elusive...

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