Archaeologists aver that the friendship between man and dog is over 15,000 years old. The reason why dogs have remained a man’s best friend for all these years is quite obvious - loyalty, unconditional love, and companionship. Your pet dog can make your life better and healthier by convincing you to be more active. No matter how lazy you feel, you can’t afford to refuse when your loving pet walks up to you and starts begging to go for a walk. The kind of service that dogs provide is simply amazing. They can be the eyes for the blind, give warning to the deaf that something needs their attention, and as police dogs they can sniff for drugs or even explosives.

But what about the dogs that are no one’s pets and are forced to loiter on the streets as strays? The main problem with the stray dog population is that it is way too high. Every Indian city or town has its share of stray dogs that roam the streets barking and bullying the hapless citizens. A spate of attacks in cities like Bangalore has only increased their vicious reputation. When chilling pictures of small children mauled by stray dogs start making headlines in the press, then even the most avid dog lover is bound to cringe. Something needs to be done. But what? Moreover, whose fault is it that there are so many strays in every Indian city and town?

The stray dogs are fairly territorial and they are always ready to fight to protect their turf from other strays. When a newer dog steps into a street that other dogs have their claim on, there ensues a very noisy altercation, which mostly entails of lots of barking. At times such noisy incidents happen during the nights and disturb the residents. Many old people and kids find it difficult to sleep, but they are forced to put up with the discomfort. The stray dogs defecate on the roads and on the sidewalks spoiling the ambiance of the area and because of their tendency to scrounge around garbage dumps they contribute to littering.

Children who are too small to defend themselves get frequently targeted by packs of stray dogs. Sometimes such attacks result in tragic deaths. Recently there was a case in Bangalore where a stray dog bit 20 people, 6 of whom were school children. In another such incident, at Hyderabad, last year, a stray dog managed to enter the campus of a Woman’s College and bite 8 students. Even when stray dogs are not biting people, they can create a nuisance by simply barking and running after passing vehicles. Twowheeler drivers being chased by a pack of dogs can prove particularly dangerous, as the driver tends to accelerate in order to avoid being bitten on his legs and he faces the risk of losing balance or crashing into something.

The danger gets vastly exemplified when it is an airport’s runway that is infested with strays. Such an unthinkable event has happened a number of times in India. On 28th March 2008, the takeoff of a Kingfisher flight had to be aborted when it collided against a stray dog that was loitering on the runway. Fortunately the crew and 25 passengers were not hurt and were immediately evacuated, but there was minor damage to the plane. Later the company issued a statement saying, “The aircraft hit a dog on the runway during its take-off roll, causing the nose landing gear to collapse.” Even the airport in the nation’s capital is not safe from strays. Few months ago a rabid dog entered Delhi international airport and bit four people before it was captured after a three-hour chase.

Almost everyone enjoys taking care of his pet dog, but feeding a stray may not make much sense. Many residents, on the pretext of being compassionate to animals, start feeding stray dogs. But when it comes to taking responsibility for the behavior of their roadside pets, no one comes forward. It hardly makes any sense to feed a creature whose behavior you can’t control. Then there are the plethora of illegal meat and chicken shops, which tend to dump their waste meat in the garbage dumps or in vacant neighborhood plots that end up serving as a magnet for stray dogs.

The meat shops can be prosecuted for throwing their waste in public places, but there is no law to stop compassionate residents from feeding the dogs. In any case, the responsibility of dealing with stray dog population lies with the municipal corporations. Till a few years back, stray dogs being put to death in large numbers were not unheard of in this country. But during the last few years there has been rise in awareness about animal rights in India. Moreover, in its 1994 judgment, the SC has clarified that killing stray dogs is not a solution to the problem.

So how do we deal with the problem? Put them in an animal shelter? But it is not that easy to catch a stray dog. When the corporation van arrives to pick them up, they perform a vanishing trick and reappear only when the municipal van has left. Sterilizing the stray dog population is a partial answer, but it is a daunting, if not impossible task to sterilize our huge dog population. According to one estimate, in South Bangalore alone, there are more than 60 dogs for every square kilometer. Our municipal corporations simply don’t have enough vaccines to sterilize that many dogs.

In Greece, hundreds of stray dogs were killed before Athens Olympics, because authorities there feared that a sight of packs of dogs roaming the streets would damage their efforts to use the Games to show the world that their country is modern and civilized. In UK local authorities killed nearly 10,000 stray dogs in 2003. According to Dogs Trust, UK’s largest dog charity, an average of one dog per hour gets put to sleep simply because their owners cannot be traced or new homes found for them. Ireland puts more than 17,000 unwanted pets put to death every year. Scotland kills only 800.

Maybe, it is time that we started emulating the drastic measures that the European nations are using to control their stray population. In fact, a former Mumbai Municipal Commissioner created quite a stir when he said, “Stray dogs must be killed as that is the world-wide practice. That is how advanced countries manage to control their stray population.” But animal activists in India oppose that type of a solution. Many animal activists want housing societies in various cities to start taking care of the strays. But taking care of a dog is a big responsibility and it is also costly. Housing societies don’t have the motivation or the financial muscle to adopt the stray dog population.

In the end, there seems to be no alternative except to put a sizable number of stray dogs to sleep. At the same time we can also try putting money into sterilization and anti-rabies programs so that at least few of the dogs can be saved. Many of the strays could vanish from the streets if pet lovers came forward to adopt them. But these days most people prefer to go in for thoroughbred dogs only, so there is hardly any home that the strays can call their own. The moot point is that we are a poor country, where countless homeless children are forced to eke out a living by begging on the streets. When we are not able to do enough for our children then how can we come to the aid of our canine friends.