Stray dogs roaming the Indian capital may soon find themselves attending police training school, with civic authorities planning to turn the animals into security dogs, reports said on Saturday.
New Delhi residents have long informally adopted some strays as watchdogs for their homes and shops and fed them, but this marks the first formal plan to turn them into municipal security dogs.
City authorities said they would enlist police animal trainers to work with the strays and press the canines into service as guard dogs alongside a newly formed “May I Help You?” city security force that aims to assist the public and bolster safety.
Photo: AFP
“If these dogs are going to roam the NDMC [New Delhi Municipal Corp] area, they might as well work,” the civic body’s chairman, Jalaj Shrivastava, told The Hindu newspaper.
“Our plan is to adopt these strays and train them as guard dogs” to work with the public security force; 40 officers have already been deployed with the city planning to engage as many as 700, he said.
However, “we do not expect street dogs to perform high-end security activities,” such as sniffing for dangerous substances including explosives, Shrivastava told the Hindustan Times newspaper.
While some stray dogs are friendly and docile, others are more menacing, barking ferociously at strangers on New Delhi streets, and there is a high incidence of dog bites.
Night watchmen doing their rounds often take a bamboo stick to scare dogs away.
“This initiative is meant to address two issues: Take the strays off the streets, thereby tackling the dog menace, and make the city safer for residents,” Shrivastava said.
There are no recent figures on the number of dogs in Delhi, but a 2009 city survey put them at more than 260,000.
The reports did not say how many dogs would be used in the security scheme, or when their training would start.
Dogs are to be fed and vaccinated under the plan, a move welcomed by animal rights activists.
“This will engage the street dogs with society and also benefit people,” animal rights activist Radha Unnikrishnan said.
A 2001 law forbids killing roaming dogs and the stray population has since soared, feeding off India’s infamous mountains of street garbage, as well as on kitchen scraps given to them by residents.
Hindus object to the killing of many types of animals, but the stray population in cities across the country has risen to such a level — estimates are in the millions — that many officials are worried.
Cities across India already run sterilization and vaccination programs, but an estimated 20,000 people die each year from rabies infections in the nation, about 36 percent of the global annual total of 55,000, according to WHO figures. Many of the Indian rabies victims are children.
A number of India’s growing affluent class have dogs as pets. However, most prefer pedigreed dogs, seeing them as status symbols, and scorn so-called “Indian” mixed-breed mutts, known as “desi dogs.”
However, many expensive pure breeds end up abandoned when people get tired of looking after them.
The strays program is the latest animal initiative in New Delhi.
An Indian federal minister earlier this month announced the hiring of 40 professional monkey impersonators in government buildings to frighten away rhesus macaque monkeys that terrorize bureaucrats by invading offices, grabbing files and snatching food.
The 40 “monkey wallahs,” a term roughly translating as monkey men, who mimic sounds of the larger langurs that were long used to scare away macaques until authorities started enforcing in 2012 an old wildlife law prohibiting langurs’ captivity.
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