The wantonness, irrationality, brutality and savagery characterizing the Bangalore killings raise a few fundamental questions. Would there have been a demand for killing all human beings, to say nothing of the BBMP acceding to it with alacrity, had the two children been killed by two men? The answer would, of course, be an emphatic 'No'. There have been murders of children and serial killings in Bangalore and elsewhere. But in no case has there been a demand for a mass killing of all human beings in the area or their confinement in concentration camps under the most inhuman conditions.

I doubtless run the risk of being dubbed stupid for asking this question, and of being told that the lives of human beings are far more important than those of animals and that the two can under no circumstance be equated. I have often wondered whether people making such statements have thought over the implications of what they are saying. The statement needs to be viewed both as it stands by itself, and with reference to the mass killing of stray dogs in Karnataka in the context of which it is made.

As it stands by itself, it means in its fullest connotation that the lives of all human beings collectively are more important than the lives of all animals collectively. As of now, such a formulation is of purely academic interest. Though the danger of all non-human living beings being wiped out if 'progress' continues the way it is doing now, is real-human activities are wiping out three animal or plant species every hour, according to one report-the world has yet to face a situation in which it has had to choose between the lives of all human beings on the one hand and those of all animals on the other.

One has faced situations in which some animals and birds-such as cattle afflicted with the Mad Cow disease and poultry with bird flu-have threatened some human beings. They have been summarily dispatched. The question is: what happens if the choice is between the lives of all animals and the life of one human being, particularly if that human being has been found guilty of genocide or is a contract killer? Equally, what happens if the choice is between one human being and an entire species of animals or a large number of animals of a particular species, say barking deer?

I would, of course, be accused of splitting hair and told that these are purely hypothetical questions, which should be unceremoniously ignored. These, however, need to be asked because sweeping generalizations, made without their implications being thought through, have helped to create ill-informed, hate-filled mindsets that have played havoc with the lives of both humans and other living beings. This will become clear if one considers the statement in the specific context of Karnataka in which it has been made. It is one thing to contend that a stray dog that has mauled a child to death should be euthanized and quite another to say that all stray dogs should be killed because one of them has killed a child. It needs to be remembered here that the death penalty is awarded to humans only in the 'rarest of rare' cases where the charge of murder has been proved beyond all reasonable scope for doubt and where the crime is particularly heinous in nature.

What is sought here is not just that a stray dog that has killed a child should be executed but that all such dogs-even those who have never harmed any human being-should be slaughtered because one of them 'may' kill a person. This means that two very different yardsticks of justice are applied to human beings and stray dogs respectively, and that the latter does not belong to the moral universe to which humans do-a subject that will be dealt with later.

Meanwhile, one will have to deal with the possible retort-the substance of which has been conveyed in various forms before-that anything that threatens the life of even one human being should be eliminated because the Indian Constitution enshrines the right to life as a fundamental right. All stray dogs, it is further argued, should be killed as they are carriers of rabies and thus threaten the lives of human beings.

The possible retort and the underlying argument show the relevance of one of the two questions I had raised, 'What happens if the choice is between one human being and an entire species of animals or a large number of animals of a particular species, say barking deer?' Only, for barking deer read stray dogs here. And given the paranoia and worse that had gripped a section of Karnataka's population when the authorities declared open season on all stray dogs, a time may well come when they will assert that all animals in the world should be killed because they threaten the life of one man!

Why Not Trucks, Buses and Cars?

The retort also raises a further set of questions even if we ignore the fact that humans pose the greatest threat to the lives of other members of their species. One of these is: Why should there not be a ban on all trucks, buses, motorcars, motorbikes and scooters? According to a report in the Hindustan Times of 31 August 2007, the number of people killed in road accidents in India was 81,966 in 1999, 78,911 in 2000,80,888 in 2001, 84,674 in 2002, 85,998 in 2003, 92,618 in 2004 and94, 968 in 2005.2 The figures speak for themselves even when viewed against the APCRI's questionable estimate of there being 20,565 human deaths from rabies annually in India.

One runs into two answers to this. First, motor vehicles do not per se threaten the lives of human beings and the danger they pose can be progressively eliminated through better traffic management and training of drivers. But stray dogs also do not per se threaten the lives of human beings. A very small percentage of them bite human beings. Instances like the ones in which two children were allegedly mauled to death by them in Bangalore are very, very rare, and the circumstances in which both had occurred raise many questions, which have remained unanswered.

Besides, people do not die merely because they have been bitten by stray dogs. Rabies can doubtless cause death. We, however, have seen that it is eminently preventable both among humans and dogs. There is, besides, no reliable estimate of the number of stray dogs that become rabid and spread the disease. Nor is there any definitive statistics about the incidence of rabies deaths in India. We have seen that there is a huge gulf between the actual number of cases of human rabies reported every year and the estimated figure put out by the APCRI. The latter's estimate needs to be taken with serious reservations for two reasons. First, the gulf between it and the actual number of cases reported cannot be explained by under-reporting, which the APCRI cites as the cause, at a time when people are highly aware of their rights, including that to medical attention, and the spread of the communication revolution has opened up even remote parts of the country. The second is the conflict of interest that arises from APCRI's close links with pharmaceutical companies manufacturing anti-rabies vaccines for humans, and whose sales are closely linked to the incidence of rabies cases among humans.

It would seem that the real explanation for the absence of any demand for banning cars, buses and trucks from the roads despite the very large number of deaths they cause every year lies in the fact that it would, if conceded, gravely inconvenience humans. Raw material will not come to-and manufactured products will not move from-factories, except by hand, horse or bullock carts. Supplies will stop coming to shops, people will have to walk or cycle to office.
Doctors will have to cycle to their clinics and hospitals. In short, life will become miserable for members of India's pampered middle and upper classes, many of whom do not think-and totally wrongly, as will be seen later-that they would in any way be put out if stray dogs are slaughtered en masse.

There is, besides, a fundamental philosophical and moral question.
Who decides whether the lives of human beings are more important than those of stray dogs or, for that matter, any other species of animals? I am sure that stray dogs and other animals have a view on the matter that is very different from, say, those of the functionaries of SDFB and would have articulated it had they the capacity for rational verbal communication. Unfortunately for them, they cannot do so.
Nor can they embark on a mass, organized killing of human beings in the same way humans ruthlessly slaughtered them in Karnataka.

The fact is that all life is precious- human, animal and plant-and the survival of each category depends on that of the other two. We have to approach the question whether the lives of human beings or stray dogs-or for that matter of all animals-were more important, at two levels-the pragmatic-empirical and the philosophical- historical.
At the pragmatic-empirical level, the question, as we have seen, has arisen in the context of the demand by a section of people in Karnataka that all stray dogs must be killed on the ground that they threaten the lives of humans. They might have had a point if all stray dogs threatened all human beings. They do not. In fact most stray dogs do not; otherwise the number of cases of their biting people would have been much higher than what we have seen. Besides, as noticed earlier, pet, and not stray, dogs have bitten people in a very large number of cases. Apart from the figures given in Chapter 2 of pet dogs biting people in Bangalore, a report from Pune makes interesting reading:

From 5,600 dog-bite cases in 2001 (reported at Sassoon Hospital), the figure has (had?) gone up to an alarming 8,751 in 2002.
Till May 2003, the hospital had a total of 3,815 dog-bite patients.
However, according to the hospital medical officer, Namdeo Patil, 70 per cent of dog-bite cases were from pet dogs.

(Pages 107 – 111)

....I still remember an incident I had witnessed nearly 50 years ago in Kolkata. A little girl, a toddler, who had got separated from her parents, had moved very close to the northern shores of the Dhakuria Lake and seemed to be in danger of falling into the water. Before any human being could react, a brown mongrel that had been sitting under a tree rushed toward her and, barking, turned her back. As we watched with admiration, the parents, who had not noticed the girl slipping away, but had been attracted to the scene by the barking, attacked the dog with stones, thinking that it was about to bite her. Several passers-by and I intervened and told them that far from attacking the child, the dog had actually saved her. They stopped stoning but walked away without the slightest appreciation of what the dog - which was limping after being hit by a stone-had done.

What the dog did above was not out of character with the innate nature of dogs. It was very much in keeping with it. The Times of India reported on 30 March 2008, of a stray dog, Julie, regularly jumping into the sea and chasing away people bathing off the Marina Beach in Chennai. Bathing is banned along the entire stretch of the latter where, as well as in the adjoining beaches, drowning has been a regular feature. The report quoted Inspector S. Sekar of Anna Nagar Police Station as saying, 'A fortnight ago we were shouting at the youngsters swimming in the sea. When Julie joined us she watched our movements and started barking at them. Later, she jumped into the sea and chased them away. Now it has become her routine.' Julie began regularly accompanying police teams patrolling the beach.

There have been many examples of dogs protecting human beings at grave risk to their own lives. J.N. Gupta, a member of the Indian Civil Service, was Commissioner of Burdwan Division in pre- Independence5 undivided Bengal in India in the 1920s. His official residence at Chinsurah was on the Ganga and he used to bathe in the river every day. One day a crocodile appeared suddenly and moved straight toward him. While others watched in horror, a stray dog, whom he fed occasionally and who sat every day on the riverbank while he bathed, jumped on the head of the crocodile. The crocodile was so disoriented by something strange landing suddenly on its head that Gupta had the time to wade back to safety, and the dog to jump ashore. From that day onward, the dog became a much loved-member of the Gupta family.

The Delhi edition of The Tribune reported on 21 February 2006 an incident in which a three-year-old child, Satindar, was abducted on 19 February by two men on a bike as he was playing with other children in front of his house in Ghaziabad. Two dogs, companions of his grandfather Mohindar Singh, chased them, jumping on them and attacking them, and forced them to abandon the child and flee after about a kilometre. There are numerous accounts of dogs' loyalty and devotion to humans. In Drawing the Line: Science and the Case for Animal Rights, Steven M. Wise cites the instance of primatologist Roger Fout's dog, Brownie, diving under the family pick up truck, which was about to hit his nine-year-old brother Ed. He quotes Fout, who was then four years old, as writing subsequently that not a family-member 'doubted for a while that Brownie had sacrificed her own life to save my brother's'. Chhatrapati Shivaji had a dog called Waghya who was at his side in every battle he fought and who jumped on to his funeral pyre as he was being cremated after his death. There are two memorials, next to each other, at the Raigad fort. The larger one is for Shivaji and the smaller one for Waghya.

Not surprisingly, fiction and mythology contain many accounts of dogs' loyalty to their masters. In Odyssey, there is a most touching account of how Odysseus, returning to Ithaca in disguise after 19 years of warfare and travel, was instantly recognized by his dog as he stood talking to the swineherd Eumaeus. Homer writes:

Stretched on the ground close to where they stood talking, there lay a dog, who now pricked his ears and raised his head. Argus was his name. Odysseus himself had owned and trained him, though he had sailed for holy Ilium before he could reap the rewards of his patience. In years gone by, the young hunters had often taken him out after wild goats, deer and hares. But now, in his owner's absence, he lay abandoned on the heaps of dung from the mules and cattle that lay in profusion at the gate, awaiting removal by Odysseus' servants as manure for his great estate. There, full of vermin, lay Argus the hound. But directly he became aware of Odysseus' presence, he wagged his tail and dropped his ears, though he lacked the strength now to come any nearer to his master. Yet Odysseus saw him from the corner of his eyes, and brushed a tear away without showing any sign of emotion to the swineherd, whom he now proceeded to sound:'Eumaeus, it is very odd to see a hound like this lying on the dung. He is a beauty, though one cannot fully tell whether his looks were matched by his pace, or whether he was just one of those dogs whom their masters feed at table and keep them for show'.

Eumaeus told Odysseus:

… [that this was] a dog whose master has met his death abroad. If you could see him in the heyday of his looks and form, as Odysseus left him when he sailed for Troy, you'd be astonished at his speed and power. But now he is in a bad way; his master far away from home has come to grief, and the women are too careless to groom him.

Odysseus then moved into his palace to confront the hordes of suitors who had gathered there for the hand of his wife Penelope who, they thought, had become a widow. Argus 'succumbed to the black hand of death' no sooner had he 'set eyes on Odysseus after those nineteen years'. He was the only living being who recognized Odysseus at first sight on his return. Neither Telemachus, his son, nor Penelope who had waited for him patiently, nor Eumaeus, who had been his faithful and hard-working servant, could do so.

There are, of course, some dogs that are aggressive and bite humans, sometimes severely. Those that are found, after careful observation, to do that, habitually and without provocation, can be euthanized if their aggression levels cannot be brought down. One, however, has to exercise extreme caution in such cases. Unless trained to attack or to guard property or persons aggressively, dogs generally bite only when they feel that they or human and non-human animals dear to them have been attacked or threatened. Wise, a distinguished animal protection lawyer, writes that he had tried several court cases in which a dog broke out of her enclosure and raced past numerous pedestrians to pounce upon an eight-or-ten-year-old boy. The parents always demanded that the dog be killed. Investigation, however, revealed that the boy had been throwing rocks at the dog or hitting her with a stick over a fence for months. One can give numerous other examples of people falsely accusing dogs of being ferocious and demanding their death. Besides, as seen earlier, the fact that some dogs are aggressive does not warrant the conclusion that all stray dogs threaten human survival and, hence, have to be killed ruthlessly.

(Pages 111 – 114)

Reprinted by permission of SAGE Publications India Pvt. Ltd. Excerpted from Savage Humans And Stray Dogs: A Study In Aggression by Hiranmay Karlekar, Rs. 295.00: Copyright © 2008; All Rights Reserved.