I don’t hate dogs, but I disagree with their owners

From what I can see, Mumbai is not the right place to bring up upright, healthy, god-fearing dogs. Wherever I look I find either malodorous mongrels menacing the timid bypasser, or podgy, pedigreed poop-machines descending from high-rises with owners in tow.

Let me be clear about my biases: I may not be comfortable with dogs, but I don’t hate dogs. It’s just that I disagree with many dog-lovers on the way they bring them up.

The problem with dog-lovers and dog-haters in Mumbai — and probably elsewhere in the country — is that they can’t agree on what to do with the abundant street varieties. The dog-haters want dangerous street-dogs extinguished or neutered; the lovers won’t agree.

I discovered what it was to be on the wrong side of the dog-loving clan when the Bombay high court said some time ago that sick and infectious dogs can be put down. I praised the court’s verdict and received a deluge of hate mail from dog-lovers. The kindest comment was one from a gentleman who asked why I wrote about dogs when I could have written about terrorism or the Union budget.

It’s a funny thing only about dog-lovers. Horse-lovers, however much their heart aches, think putting down a race-horse is fine if it breaks a leg or develops other problems. But not dog-lovers. There is something irrational about their unwillingness to keep our streets free from dangerous strays.

Caught between dog-haters and dog-lovers, the municipality has more or less given up on these disreputable curs, even though there is something called a dog squad.

I have seen these jokers at work. When they turn up with their rods and gunny bags in their Black Maria dog vans, every canine worth its salt shifts base to the next locality and warns all its pals to lie low. So the dog squad usually ends up catching few of the rabid ones. I suspect that they turn up only when they have to prove they have logged in their work-hours. Working in the dog squad is probably the closest thing we have to a municipal sinecure.

Since the dog squad won’t do its job, and dog-lovers won’t allow them to do it either, dog-haters take the law into their own hands. Since they don’t want mutts of doubtful parentage chasing their children or barking at them on their way home after a night’s tipple, they either stone them or poison them.

The unreason of dog-lovers is combated by the unreason of dog-haters.

But it’s not the street-fleabags alone that I have problems with. I find that the attitudes of many dog-lovers to their own pets fairly unloveable, despite all the coochi-cooing they do in public.

In one line: most of the dogs we keep as domestic pets are overfed, over-weight, under-worked, under-sexed and an extension of our own selves – which is not what dogs should be.

I have seen dogs brought up in Gujarati families feasting on dhoklas and in south Indian ones with curd rice and payasam. I hope these are exceptions, but clearly loving a dog means loving them for what they are, not trying to bring them up like humans.

In fact, I can now say it clearly. The only reason I never adopted a pup — or gifted one to my daughters — was because I knew I wouldn’t be able to bring it up like a dog in my vegetarian household. And that is not quite right.

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But this foolishness is catching up even with street dogs, who now feast on papads and biscuits. When I go for my morning walk, I see an elderly gentleman who comes in his car to feed the street dogs with a diet of cow milk and Parle-G. In the initial weeks, he was given a raucous welcome by his four-legged beneficiaries, but as the weeks passed, I found him going round and round the maidan looking for dogs to consume his load of glucose biscuits. I can now positively hear the dogs talking among themselves: “Oh, it’s that guy again. Wish he’d get a fleshy bone instead of you-know-what.”

The second problem is that we cannot afford to be lazy when bringing up dogs. These chappies need lots of exercise and balls thrown in all directions to keep them healthy and fit. But most Mumbai dog-families I know of exercise their dogs very little. And they come armed with sticks to see that even minor interest in canines of the opposite sex is discouraged with a whack.

The worst crime dog-lovers do is treat the world as their potty-bowl. Most owners take their pooches out for a walk only in order to do their morning’s work – deposit the doo-doo in a public place. But despite a law that expects them to scoop the poop and keep streets clean, I haven’t seen a single dog-owner coming to the park plastic spade in hand.

Even well-bred dogs are brought up with no civic sense. They are different from street dogs only in terms of their external looks, not their upbringing. Or rather, their owners’ upbringing.

We won’t let our kids crap on the streets. Then why allow our dogs to do the same?