Jayakrishnan Vu
Post News Network
Bhubaneswar, August 23: In a city with a population that is over a million, the ubiquitous packs of stray dogs creating a wide range of nuisances have let loose a quiet controversy about their numbers and the methods used for their sterilization and vaccination.
While the Bhubaneswar Municipal Corporation (BMC) puts the canine population in the capital city at 32,000, animal rights groups and citizens’ initiatives vociferously disagree and maintain that there are more than one lakh stray dogs within the city limits. Ordinary citizens, witness to numerous cases of road accidents and other hazards caused by the stray dogs across the capital city, say the number could be still more.
When it comes to efforts by the BMC to count the stray dogs, the picture becomes more unclear. The civic body’s officials responsible for the task say that they release the stray dogs back in their regular locations after conducting sterilization operations on them.
BMC officials say that a cut is made on the right ear of every sterilized dog after the operations for identification process. However, most dogs and bitches roaming on Bhubaneswar’s roads were found to bear no such marks.
“The corporation has identified about 32,000 stray dogs in the city limits. The BMC policy is not to kill the stray dogs as done by states like Kerala, but to carry out sterilization. We have sterilized about 11,200 stray dogs till June,” said BMC additional commissioner Alok Kar.
Sanjib Kumar Das, convener of People for Animals, an NGO involved in creating awareness on stray dogs, said the actual number of dogs in the city would be more than one lakh. “So far no proper scientific survey has been done in the city on stray dogs that can be called foolproof without human or technical errors,”
said Das.
The survey by World Wide Veterinary Service (WWVS), an NGO, held last year had used Global Positioning System (GPS) to locate and identify stray dogs in the city for vaccination, said Das. About 6,000 dogs had been vaccinated in that drive, he added. WWVS had roped in about 100 volunteers from Chennai for the mammoth task conducted in just four days.
For the enumeration project, photographs of the stray dogs were taken across Bhubaneswar and uploaded on to the computer servers to match them with the actual locations where the photographs were taken.
