Yeez the real problem of stray dogs in places like India (and may be Pakistan), is that they are pack animals and basically wild, so their loyalty is to the pack. Its hard to find a really humane solution.
Where Streets Are Thronged With Strays Baring Fangs
By GARDINER HARRISAUG. 6, 2012
NEW DELHI — Victims of the surprise attacks limp into one of this city’s biggest public hospitals. Among the hundreds on a recent day were children cornered in their homes, students ambushed on their way to class and old men ambling back from work.
All told the same frightening story: stray dogs had bitten them.
Deepak Kumar, 6, had an angry slash across his back from a dog that charged into his family’s shack.
“We finally closed the gates to our colony and beat the dog to death,” said Deepak’s father, Rajinder.
No country has as many stray dogs as India, and no country suffers as much from them. Free-roaming dogs number in the tens of millions and bite millions of people annually, including vast numbers of children. An estimated 20,000 people die every year from rabies infections — more than a third of the global rabies toll.
Packs of strays lurk in public parks, guard alleyways and street corners and howl nightly in neighborhoods and villages. Joggers carry bamboo rods to beat them away, and bicyclists fill their pockets with stones to throw at chasers. Walking a pet dog here can be akin to swimming with sharks.
A 2001 law forbade the killing of dogs, and the stray population has increased so much that officials across the country have expressed alarm.
In Mumbai, where more than 80,000 people reported being bitten last year, the government plans to conduct a census of the strays by using motorcycles to chase down dogs and squirt their fur with ink. A member of the Punjab Legislative Assembly proposed in June sending strays to China — where dogs are sometimes eaten — after more than 15,000 people in the state reported being bitten last year. In New Delhi, officials recently announced an intensified sterilization campaign.
India’s place as the global center for rabid dogs is an ancient one: the first dog ever infected with rabies most likely was Indian, said Dr. Charles Rupprecht, chief of the rabies program at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. Dog bites cause 99 percent of human rabies deaths.
Indeed, tackling rabies on the subcontinent is challenging because the relationships that Indian dogs maintain with humans are ancient. India’s pariah dog, the dominant street breed, is probably a descendant of an early Chinese immigrant, said Peter Savolainen, a professor of evolutionary genetics at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. With pointed ears, a wedge-shaped head and a tail that curls over its back, the pariah is similar in appearance to other prehistoric dogs like the Australian dingo.
For thousands of years, dogs’ relationship with humans was similar to that of pilot fish with sharks, said John Bradshaw, director of the Anthrozoology Institute at the University of Bristol in Britain.
“Dogs essentially started out as scavengers,” Dr. Bradshaw said. “They evolved to hang around people rather than to be useful to them.”
While that relationship has largely disappeared in the developed world, it remains the dominant one in India, where strays survive on the ubiquitous mounds of garbage. Some are fed and collared by residents who value them as guards and as companions, albeit distant ones. Hindus oppose the killing of many kinds of animals.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/07/world/asia/india-stray-dogs-are-a-menace.html
Topic: Does your religious family hate dogs?