URBAN TAILS
Integrating strays into everyday city life
Tail Focus: Dogs
THE PROBLEM
Take a drive along Indian city streets. You may find at least one street dog every 20M. And Indians have opted multiple ways to coexist with these predatory animals: from outright ignoring, to treating them as a ‘nuisance’ to empathetic caring and adoption into one’s own home. Recognising their instinctive tendency to guard ‘their pack’ humans have even leveraged the ferals, cared for them and in some cases trained them to protect their homes and businesses.
In recent days however, focus on the human-feral ‘conflict’ has been reignited with multiple incidents reported, across cities in India, of dogs lethally attacking humans – children especially. In fact, India leads the world on dog attack incidences.
With increasingly dense neighbourhoods, inadequate infrastructure, and simultaneous increase in population of stray dogs, interspecies coexistence is becoming enhancingly difficult.
THE NEED
The imminent need is to act on a sustainable solution to this human-feral dog conflict.
Solutions beyond culling: Culling is a solution pathway that stems from justified fear for life, and ensued anger and helplessness. Especially so, when we consider our species higher in the order of this food chain. It may also seem as the only way when we do not open ourselves to explore other opportunities.
At Auom, we take the stand that the first solution to explore for any human-nature conflict must be, human-nature coexistence.
Feral dogs are sentient beings. And just like any other sentient being (like say, humans), they experience the infant-mom connection as a newborn. They are inherently playful as puppies through puberty to adulthood. Through such play, they learn social interactions and develop personalities. Most importantly, their brain as well is a learning organ that gradually develops from birth through adulthood. And so, within the limitations of their cognitive abilities, they can be trained to be cordial animals. Dogs of different breeds have been known to be trained to become service dogs to patients in need.
These insights and attitude to perceive street dogs as sentient beings, are opportunities in waiting to be leveraged as solutions to reduce and mitigate human-feral conflicts on urban Indian streets.
LEVERAGE POINTS FOR AN INCLUSIVE IMPACT
Our initial observations have revealed a fundamental gap: that most humans, including many dog-friendly persons and pet-parents, function with superstitions and misconceptions about dog behaviours and preferences. Acknowledging and recognising that evidenced awareness is the first step to change, the following are the leverage points identified:
– Build evidenced awareness among common citizens and city officials,
- about dog behaviours and interaction style — particularly of community dogs.
- about various dog breeds and their personalities
- on dos and don’ts by pet parents and community dog care takers.
– Foster dialogue and discourse to shift the needle from justified fear and hatred towards empathy and solution-driving.
PROJECT STATUS
Seeking further funding