New Delhi: Stray dogs are proving to be a bone of contention not just in India but also in Pakistan. In a posh area in Karachi’s Defence Housing Authority, strays have suddenly vanished, and residents are claiming that they have been culled by the municipal body.
Animal activists, in a report in Dawn, said that instead of implementing proper rabies vaccination drives, the authorities were simply killing them. Some of the missing dogs were already neutered and vaccinated, they added.
The ‘menace’ posed by stray dogs is a hotly debated topic in Karachi in the media as well. Last year, more than 26,000 people in the city were attacked by strays. Another report pegs the number of strays across Pakistan at three million, but the exact number is not known. Sindh has the maximum number of stray dogs and its capital Karachi has the highest number of dog bites in the country. And with more than 2,000 rabies deaths every day, Pakistan ranks fifth among the countries in the world most affected by this.
According to Dr Naseem Salahuddin, the chairperson of the rabies-free Pakistan campaign, authorities in Karachi have no interest in formulating a policy to eradicate the disease.
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Killings, mass poisoning
But culling is not the answer, said activists. The Pakistan Prevention of Cruelty of Animals Act 1890 makes it illegal, but the country has a history of killing stray dogs as a means of population control. Culling of stray animals has been deemed ineffective by the World Organisation for Animal Health to control animal diseases.
“What the authorities should have been implementing by now is a humane citywide mass vaccination drive to control rabies in street dogs,” Mahera Omar, the co-founder of the Pakistan Animal Welfare Society (Paws), said to Dawn. She suggested that the authorities engage with local communities to spread awareness.
But more often than not, authorities have been accused of mass killing and even poisoning strays.
In Sindh, the government issued a statement in 2020 that said it would control wild animals by vaccinating them instead of killing them. In February 2021, the government killed the dogs that had been vaccinated and given collars, before private shelters and NGOs could even help them, Arab News reported.
It’s not just stray dogs who are mistreated in Pakistan. Last month a malnourished pet lion was seen roaming the streets of Karachi. Even animals in zoos are not safe. The case of the elephant Noor Jehan was hotly debated on social media earlier this year, with her decline being compared to the ‘collapse of the nation’.