I am not sentimental about animals, but I do strongly believe that like humans they too have rights and the right to life is preminent amongst them. A few weeks back in a city reputed to be the software capital of the emerging markets, a pack of street dogs or ferral animals attacked a child and mauled him so badly that he died. I admit that this is a horrific tragedy and my heart goes out to the parents whose only child died in this unspeakable manner. The reaction of the civic authorities to this tragedy was totally dispropotionate and the "Municipal Commissioner" declared war on all street/ferral dogs. In the past 2 to 3 weeks nearly 1500 dogs have been rounded up and killed in the most horrible manner.
Untrained dog catchers armed with nets and iron tongs catch the animals and clobber them on their heads with a bent steel bar and as the struggling amimals gasps for breath the iron tongs are used to strangle the poor creature. The horror of this barbaric war on the voiceless creatures have been brought into the public domain by a national TV channel that beamed live footage of this uncivilised and cruel program of extermination.
I do admit that street or stray dogs can be troublesome and at times even dangerous. But killing nearly 2000 health animals seems to me to be an overreaction and smacks of a fundamentally exterminist mind set. For some time I ran an outfit called People for Animals and even got a well known animal rights activist to inaugurate our chapter. My approach was what is called the ABC policy: Animal Birth Control policy. We managed to catch a few animals brought them to the Campus where I teach and with the help of the teachers and students of the local vetinanary school conducted spaying and nuetering operations. With the left ear slightly clipped as a token of his status as a spayed animal we used to release it back into the community from which we had picked him up. The program was a success until the UNiversity Administration stepped in and fobid the use of the Campus for this program. The point is that even under such a condition the mortality rate was around 2 for every 10 animals and I used to feel deep saddness for the loss of life for afterall it was I who had them picked up brought over for the birth control procedure.
Even then the wholesale and wanton culling of stray animals is not justified and I personally feel extremely saddened at the horrendous loss of life that this campaign has taken. As I said that I do feel that initiating an ABC policy is far better than going in for a whole scale culling of strays.