Why stray dog lovers are a menace to society
There are various ways to announce to the world that one is slightly empty upstairs.
You write down your Pronouns on your social media handles.
You claim to be pro-Net Neutrality because you watched one AIB video on the subject.
You think that fact checkers are a fount of honest journalism.
You blame Chrislamocommies for everything wrong in the country.
You conclude that one person's rant about a historical figure rather than the actions of a mob are responsible for brutal murders.
You constantly tweet about some underperforming football club on the other side of the planet and lament about some Fergie dude.
You get all your “unbiased” news from a former Buzzfeed employee’s Instagram handle.
You throw oil on Van Gogh’s paintings to fight climate change.
You think bending a few facts is fine when “fighting” fascism.
But, at the very top of the pyramid, an act that confirms one’s lack of mental faculties, is to announce to the world that one is a dog parent, as if one is capable of interspecies conception.
Now let's be clear, there's nothing wrong with having pets, but making that fact your sole personality is as annoying as thinking that you're Che Guevara because you tweet about fascism all day long or that you’re a tech journalist because you review mobile phones.
In the past, I’ve learned that saying one doesn’t care for dogs is more blasphemous than saying one is a Sanghi in elite circles.
I'd written many moons ago in a piece titled 'Confessions of a Dog Hater' that my biggest pet peeve is when dog owners start comparing dogs to human children. I had written: “The other day I was perplexed when one friend complained about how inhuman people were to leave their kids tied up in the hot sun. I am sorry, but a dog is not your kid. Dogs are a different species, as evidenced by their DNA sequence. They don't talk back to you or allow you to live your dreams through them. They're not going to crack IIT so you can gloat about how well you raised your child to your better-paid neighbors. They're not going to marry someone you chose, so you can flaunt how you got them married into a great family.”
My piece had invited the kind of vitriolic invectives I’ve not experienced in 12 years of riling up the commentariat from the ruling dispensation to top Bollywood actors to religious fanatics. And I can say, with a degree of certitude borne out of years of being the subject of targeted trolling (where are Reporters Without Borders when you need them?) and being an avid troll myself, that no rabid fanbase can match the incoherence of dog maniacs, who can make Bhai's fans look like the members of the MENSA society. To borrow a phrase from my former boss: “Most are incapable of forging loving, meaningful human relationships, which they have found from dogs.”
Like all fundamentalism, doggie fundamentalism is held together by moderates justifying or being silent about the behaviour of the insane fringe – which in this case are stray dog lovers or feeders who seem to have a lot of support from a group that my inner Marx likes to call "petty bourgeois". In fact, it’s a cruel irony that people who often go around mocking cow lovers have a similar love for canines, except it’s filial instead of maternal.
For the petty bourgeois of this country, dog lives – even stray ones – matter far more than those of poor humans. In fact, the petty bourgeois, like all other aspects of American-imported wokeism have deemed that you can't call them 'stray dogs' and ought to call them 'community gods'. It is a great idea because when you are being chased, it's very important not to deadname the group chasing you.
The most recent episode of Poor Man vs Urban Wild comes from Noida – a city whose identity largely consists of a strange iteration of Fight-Club feminism which involves women assaulting security guards – where a labourer couple’s child, working inside a gated society, was mauled by a stray.
Gory details about the incident suggest that the seven-month-old’s intestines were ripped out by the dog. To add insult to injury, the canine lovers from the society reportedly prevented dog catchers from catching the accused canine, asked for a post-mortem of the deceased baby, wondered why the parents had left the kid ‘unsupervised’, and even pointed out that the labourers could reproduce and have another kid in nine months. Much like the IAS officer who saw it fit to walk his dog in a taxpayer-paid multi-million-dollar stadium while forcing athletes to finish their practice, we were reminded of one basic tenet of doggie fundamentalism – the lives of dogs, even strays, matters more than those of everyone else, particularly the poor people.
This isn’t a one-off. Every single day you read about someone who has been attacked by dogs. A delivery guy bit in a lift. A 12-year-old losing her life after being bitten near the eye.
As this report notes: “Since 2019, India has recorded over 1.5 crore dog bite cases. Uttar Pradesh, which has the greatest number of strays, has witnessed the most incidents with 27.52 lakh cases, followed by Tamil Nadu (20.7 lakh) and Maharashtra (15.75 lakh).” Rabies might be largely preventable, but India accounts for 36% of all the world’s deaths from rabies.
It’s a problem that exists everywhere, including in the nation's capital where the civic bodies don't even have a count for how many stray dogs roam the streets and yet a civic body chief has the temerity to say: “Dogs normally don't bite if they are treated with kindness and fed. Under a new scheme run by us, people can adopt stray dogs and we will help them vaccinate and sterilize the adopted dogs.”
Six months ago, I had my own tryst with the canines when I was gheraoed by a pack of strays outside my house in Delhi, perfect symbolism of new India where: Kutta ghar mein ghusta bhi hai, aur kaat ta bhi hai.


Sadly, I didn’t develop any animal-themed powers, though I heard reports that the stray dog that bit me is now going around making memes and mocking liberals.
What I did get were five huge injections and an interesting anecdote about how rampant the situation is. In the hospital, there were three other dog bite victims, and one of them had been bitten inside the hospital premises, which had its fair share of strays. One of the kids was bitten on her face and her wails as the doctors were injecting her, will remain with me for a long time. And yet, after learning that I'd been bitten, many of the comments reminded me of rape apologia.
What were you doing out at night?
What did you do to the dogs? You must have done something to excite them.
I always walk late at night, and I pass a lot of dogs and they never bite me.
They are just strays looking for food, don’t blame them.
Dogs will be dogs.


It’s in line with the judiciary’s view on the stray dog menace. Recently, the Supreme Court refused to let Kerala’s civic bodies kill stray dogs. Earlier in the year, the SC backed a Delhi High Court order that allowed residents to feed stray dogs inside their colonies which had been paused on the ground that it could “intensify the problem”. In fact, it asked the RWA or Municipal corporation to ensure that every area had “access to food and water in the absence of caregivers or community dog feeders”.
While I will not have to prowl the streets looking for strays, the order is a reminder that for the well-heeled, the lives of stray dogs are more valuable than the lives of the less rich. This 'designated area' spiel shows how out-of-touch one of the four pillars of democracy is with the real nature of the universe we live in as opposed to the perceived nature of the imaginary universe they imagine we dwell in.
Now let's be clear, I don't blame stray dogs but the canine fundamentalists enabling them. People’s lives are endangered by dog lovers who feed strays, thus creating a Pavlovian response for them where they chase and attack anyone walking the roads. More often than not, this results in dogs attacking anyone walking by, which is more dangerous for small children who can be overwhelmed by a pack of strays. And nothing’s likely to change because the petty bourgeois can take a car up to their door without having to deal with the strays. Poor people, on the other hand, don't have that luxury as they try and navigate urban spaces without being attacked or, in worse cases, killed. On the other hand, when they do attack the dogs in self-defense, they are labeled as canine haters like the constable who used his stick to fend off strays.
The irony is that in a country like ours, where political parties are constantly quibbling over inane things like whether Aurangzeb was “woke” or a Bengali politician’s inability to speak Hindi – that have no actual bearing on the lives of the everyman – any party which decides to make the anti-stray dog menace its pet cause in an urban constituency would sweep any election.
In fact, I was telling a friend who's a member of a prominent political party that tackling this menace is very low-hanging fruit for a smart politician, because the number of folks who are victims far outnumber those who are batting for strays running wild on our streets.
Sadly, it’s hard to teach – to borrow from myriad canine-inspired idioms – an old dog (in this case politicians) a new trick, which means that the streets of urban India will remain a deadly obstacle course for many. Even a dog’s life – warts and all – is better than a poor Indian’s. Because all four arms of our democracy would rather let rabid stray dogs lie and let poor people die.