India’s booming stray dog population confounds efforts to eradicate rabies

In June this year, a stray dog entered a maternity ward in a private hospital in India’s busy northern city of Panipat in the early hours of the morning and picked up a newborn from beside its sleeping mother.

The family found the three-day-old’s body the next day outside the hospital, presumably mauled to death by a pack of dogs.

This is a common enough occurrence in India to warrant British veterinarian Andy Gibson to launch a mission over the last decade to eradicate rabies in the country that lives cheek by jowl with 40 million free-roaming dogs.

On his first visit to India, as part of a 2013 project to the southern temple city of Madurai, he had a glimpse of the unique problem faced by the country.

“One of the big challenges in India is that there’s a much larger free-roaming dog population – well mixed between community dogs and owned roaming dogs – that no one can really handle,” Gibson, director of research at the global charity Mission Rabies, tells The Independent.

“In African countries, the approach to rabies control is focused on getting owners to bring their dogs to a central point for immunisation to get a critical herd-immunity threshold of 70 per cent vaccine coverage,” he says.

But in India, home to a growing population of free-roaming dogs, such an approach would not work, he says.

Even among the countries with a very high free-roaming dog population, India stands out, accounting for about 20 million dog bite cases per year, and nearly a third of the global rabies burden of 59,000 deaths.

Although government records typically show more than 100 reported fatalities each year due to rabies, experts say the true burden could be to the tune of around 20,000 per annum.

“The numbers are alarming because it is wholly vaccine-preventable. Many rabies cases still go undetected or undiagnosed or misdiagnosed,” says disease ecologist Abi Vanak from the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (ATREE).

But despite such a high burden, India made rabies a notifiable disease only in September 2021.

The deadly viral disease is transmitted through the saliva or bite of an infected animal, and dogs are vectors in up to 99 per cent of all human cases.

People suffer an agonising course of infection with severe symptoms, including extreme agitation, hallucinations, hydrophobia, violent behaviour, and insomnia until death.

While some concerned citizens are working tirelessly to inoculate dogs against the virus, there are also reports of people living in housing societies harassing those feeding strays.

On the other hand, dogs are also causing direct deaths, especially of children.

“India’s rabies burden is proportional to the human and dog population,” Vanak says.

However, formulating a balanced policy at state and national levels by including the views of rabies experts, ecologists, as well as animal welfare activists has been a challenge.

Last year, addressing often reported conflicts between dog feeders and resident welfare associations, the Delhi High Court ruled that community dogs have the right to food and that citizens can feed them in designated areas.

But experts say even feeding dogs in designated areas could make them prone to aggressive territorial behaviour and result in more biting of people.

“Dogs are territorial, and if someone’s feeding them in designated areas, they are going to move across to go to these places, increasing aggression among them,” Anindita Bhadra, a behavioural biologist studying free-ranging (stray) dogs at IISER Kolkata, says.

Dog feeding in several parts of India has also evolved into a new problem, she says.

“Nowadays we have people, thinking that they are doing a huge service, bringing buckets of khichdi or rice, and laying out the food on newspapers or even plates. The number of dogs will keep on increasing due to this in these areas as there’s just too much resource for them on a regular basis,” she adds.

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Such feeding is leading to an explosion of dog populations in some neighbourhoods as those from other areas move in, leading to even more territorial conflict. With the excess food, dogs in these areas are also making more puppies.

Experts say animal lovers can be more responsible by ensuring the dogs are not just fed, but also vaccinated and sterilised, so that localised dog population booms don’t happen.

“Animal welfare groups are a rather confused lot. They have convinced themselves that feeding dogs and other animals in public spaces is the ultimate expression of compassion but predictably, this has led to massive conflict between people and dogs, and dogs and wildlife,” Vanak says.

He says welfare groups should instead push for better legislation to ensure compulsory licensing of pet dogs, adoption of dogs on the street, and ensuring that high-quality shelters are constructed for them.

“But of course, all this requires work, and it’s easier to throw some food on the street and show some ‘low-stakes niceness’,” the disease ecologist says.

He argues that the dog population crisis in India requires a full rethinking of the cultural relationship between people and dogs.

“The ambiguous relationship that Indians have with dogs is a lose-lose situation. Dogs suffer from poor welfare outcomes, people suffer from rabies, dog bites, maulings, and wildlife suffer from attacks,” Vanak explains.

“We cannot afford the hollow romanticism that some associate with having millions of free-ranging dogs on streets as a quintessential Indian way of life,” he says.

“It is a complicated picture, and the issue of dog overpopulation is a longer-term issue to be solved over a 10-year period through societal change, and dog ownership,” Gibson concurs.

But in the short term, he says vaccinating strays against rabies can be a cost-effective way to address the problem.

His team’s three-pronged approach, including vaccination, data gathering and education of local communities, has helped the coastal Indian state of Goa get on track to eliminating rabies.

Using smartphones to capture data on strays, as well as pop-up clinics and vaccination points, Gibson and his team saw the immunisation of more than 95,000 dogs and facilitation of rabies education of 150,000 children each year. Their work enabled Goa to be declared a rabies-controlled state in 2021, the first of its kind in India.

Vanak says although vaccinating dogs is the recommended method for controlling rabies, a campaign of this kind would have to be carried out “in perpetuity” if the root cause is not fixed.

Antony Rubin, an animal welfare activist in Chennai, says tackling the dog population boom in neighbourhoods also urgently requires robust waste management measures.

Citing the example of the southern Indian state of Kerala, he says frequent reports of dog bites are linked to improper waste management by the meat industry there.

“In Kerala, meat waste from shops is discarded randomly. The dogs there feed on these and are very healthy,” Rubin explains, adding that spacious green neighbourhoods in the state provide easy escape routes for the canines when city officials attempt to catch them for sterlisation.

Experts say there is a lack of communication between stakeholders across domains of the government.

“One basic problem is we never have a consolidated effort from policymakers, people working on canine behaviour, dog welfare activists, experts working on rabies, and those who can explain case histories of circumstances in which people were bitten by dogs,” Bhadra says.

“We can always find out how to be within the premises of the law and at the same time, see what is fine for both people and animals. So we need a more balanced approach which I don’t see happening,” she adds.