Indian sophistication on stray dogs can be confusing

livemint.com:

Now and then, stray dogs tear a child apart. Old people too. This is rare.

But they do kill thousands of Indians every year in a less dramatic way, through rabies, and dozens of other diseases. The World Health Organization speculates the figure could be 20,000. Of these, “30% to 60%" are children under the age of 15.

Most of them must be poor because if this had happened to middle-class people or the rich, India would have probably exterminated stray dogs by now. Lakhs of Indians are bitten every year; innumerable motorcyclists fall when they are chased by dogs. Yet, in dealing with stray dogs, India has among the most compassionate regimes in the world.

Some of the laws that protect homeless dogs are so thoughtful that it would appear a stray dog has infiltrated law-making. In India, public spaces and private colonies are territories of stray dogs. If a dog mauls and kills a child, the dog would be taken away for a few days and observed.

If it does not appear aggressive, it would be returned to the very place it had attacked the child. And people cannot be stopped from feeding it. This is confusing because except for animal rights, in all other aspects, India has evolved into a practical unsophisticated middle-class nation that has no patience for esoteric liberal values like ‘free speech’ or ‘privacy.’ The fount of liberal sophistication, the West, has long got rid of its stray dog problem chiefly by killing them.

Yet, a small group of global animal lovers has managed to pressure India into enacting sophisticated laws that favour dogs over the human poor. Stray dogs are an easy civic problem to solve, and very difficult moral problem. People who claim to love them should be asked to do more than attach a collar on