[India has some of the most pro-dog laws on the planet. It is illegal here to kill healthy strays, and the result is millions of them — perhaps as many as 30 million across the country. Packs of dogs trot through the parks, hang around restaurants for scraps (which they usually get), and sprawl on their bellies inside railway stations as rushing commuters leap over them.]
By Jeffrey Gettleman
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Stray
dogs proliferate across India, benefiting from generous laws protecting them.
Mumbai,
above, is considered something of a sanctuary city for dogs.
CreditAtul Loke for The New York
Times
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MUMBAI,
India — Mumbai turns out to
be a pretty good place to be a dog.
The poorest people living on the streets
barely have enough food themselves, but they feed strays. And the rich, well,
some go completely overboard.
One Bollywood actress provides steaming
vessels of chicken and rice every morning for dozens of neighborhood dogs.
Another woman drives around in a specially outfitted Honda delivering meals to
more than 100, sprinkling in special spices depending on the season. (Turmeric
is good during the monsoons, she says, to help boost the dogs’ immunity.)
India has some of the most pro-dog laws on
the planet. It is illegal here to kill healthy strays, and the result is
millions of them — perhaps as many as 30 million across the country. Packs of
dogs trot through the parks, hang around restaurants for scraps (which they
usually get), and sprawl on their bellies inside railway stations as rushing
commuters leap over them.
That’s not necessarily a good thing. It is no
coincidence that India also leads the world in deadly rabies cases. In the
state of Kerala, vigilantes saw strays as such a threat that they began
methodically hunting dogs down until last November, when the Supreme Court
ordered them to stop.
More typically, though, the dogs are widely
cared for. Some people won’t even call them strays, preferring the more
respectful label of “community dogs.” And within India, Mumbai is considered
something of a sanctuary city for them.
But that reputation briefly hit a bump a few
weeks ago, after some dogs took a dip in a Mumbai river and came out blue.
Photos of the “Blue Dogs of Mumbai” went
viral, and initial news reports speculated that the dogs’ fur had changed
because of some weird pollution effects.
Upon close investigation, it turned out that
a dye company had released products into a drainage ditch that flowed into a
Mumbai river where the dogs liked to play. Coloring for clothing had stained
the dogs’ fur, and the monsoon rains soon blasted it off.
What was interesting — and moving — was the
community efforts to rally around the blue dogs and help them.
“India is pretty unique,” said Ingrid
Newkirk, the British-American co-founder of People for the Ethical Treatment of
Animals, who grew up in India. “Maybe it’s a karmic sense, this idea that the
dog could be you and if you don’t watch out in life it could be you again.
“Or,” she wondered, “maybe it’s just that the
poor have greater compassion because they can relate to other individuals who
are having a hard time trying to survive.”
The neighborhood where this happened, Taloja,
about an hour’s drive east of central Mumbai, is heavily industrialized. Trucks
carrying rolls of steel rumble down the roads. Big plants grow out of the
sidewalk. Factories stretch to the horizon and smokestacks spew out
who-knows-what, leaving a rotten-egg taste in the air.
As Dilip Bhoir, a contractor here, put it,
“No matter how expensive the perfume you wear, you’ll never be able to get rid
of that stink.”
Still, Taloja is teeming with canines, and
the line between a stray and a pet is blurry. Factory workers and villagers
feed certain dogs and even buy shampoo to wash them. But the dogs don’t live
inside homes and are free to roam around.
Most of India’s street dogs are about two
feet tall, short-haired, curly-tailed, trim but not scrawny, and descended from
an ancient breed related to the Australian dingo.
After some factory workers spotted a pack of
dogs that were bright blue, Taloja sprang into action.
Workers called a neighborhood human rights
activist who then called a neighborhood animal rights advocate who then called
a nearby animal hospital. An ambulance was rushed to the scene.
A few days later, in another incident near a
factory, villagers waded into a ditch coursing with nitric acid and rescued a
dog that was trapped.
Niharika Kishan Gandhi, the wealthy woman who
feeds 100 dogs from the back of her Honda in suburban Mumbai, took a stab at
answering the question of why Indians, in general, seem especially friendly to
animals.
“It comes down to tolerance,” she said.
“We’ve lived under Moghul rule, under British rule. It’s crowded here, it’s
diverse, and to survive, you need to be tolerant.”
She added, “The more tolerant you are, the
more compassion you have.”
In Mumbai, a dozen robust charities,
including one called The Welfare of Stray Dogs, cruise around the city,
treating sick dogs and taking healthy ones to animal hospitals for vaccinations
and sterilizations before depositing them back exactly where they were found,
as the law requires. (It’s illegal here to displace a dog.)
India’s government has made a decision not to
kill strays but to reduce the population gradually through sterilizations. The
result in Mumbai, animal welfare experts say, is a virtuous cycle.
Sterilized dogs, which don’t have puppies or
prowl around for mates, tend to be more relaxed, which makes people less
fearful of them, which makes the dogs friendlier, which makes people even more
accepting of them.
Respect for animals is enshrined in India’s
Constitution, which says that every Indian should “have compassion for living
creatures.” Few places are as emblematic of this as the animal hospital in
Thane, near Mumbai, where the Taloja residents took the acid dog and the one
blue dog they were able to catch.
On a recent day, the hospital’s patients
included: 37 dogs, eight cats, six soft-shell turtles, two ducks, two rabbits
and a cattle egret with a broken wing.
A commotion erupted when a group of burly men
burst through the door, moving through the hospital corridors as one, huddled
around a small brown object: a monkey electrocuted while climbing a power line.
The vets set to it, calling out for IVs, scissors, medicine and tape.
For the blue dog, all the vitals were
checked. After five days of observation, he (the dog was a male, about 8 years
old) was discharged in good health.
The acid dog didn’t have such good luck. The
hospital named him Babu, and he is now basically blind.
The other day, Babu didn’t look so good. He
stood on shaky legs inside a cage, a thick worm of red and green mucus hanging
out of his nose.
“Don’t worry,” said Madhavi Irani, one of the
caretakers, nonchalantly wiping the dog’s nose with her fingers. “Babu just has
a little cold.”