“No dog has ever been responsible for the slaughter of six million Jews, which Adolf Hitler was during the days of the Third Reich. Nor has any been instrumental in perpetrating the kind of mass slaughter that accompanied the partition of India in 1947, particularly communal carnages … Erich Fromm writes in The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness … ‘Man is the only mammal who is a large-scale killer and a sadist’.”
It’s a statement that lingers even as I finish reading Hiranmay Karlekar’s Savage Humans and Stray Dogs: A Study in Agression, a book, which admittedly isn’t great-looking but one heady with information on the plight of animals, stray dogs in particular, in India. Despite the book’s clinical approach in writing — a tone which is essential for most books that deal with hard facts based on case studies — Karlekar doesn’t sound distant. On the contrary, while using the example of the mass killings of stray dogs in Bangalore in January 2007, after two dogs allegedly killed two children in Bangalore, as a case study, Karlekar juxtaposes, in the book, some of his own experiences as a pet lover. At one point, for instance, he talks about an incident that he witnessed 50 years ago in Kolkata. “A little girl, a toddler, who had got separated from her parents, had moved very close to the northern shores of the Dhakuria Lake … A brown mongrel … rushed towards her and, barking, turned her back. As we watched in admiration, the parents … attracted to the scene by the barking, attacked the dog with stones… Several passers-by and I intervened that … the dog had saved her. They stopped stoning but walked away without the slightest appreciation of what the dog — which was limping — had done.”
Even as one imagines Karlekar’s book gracing the book shelves of school and college libraries, individuals preparing papers on a similar subject and experts (NGOs, in particular) quoting generously from the book henceforth, there are portions that will give you gooseflesh and make you want to cry. I warn, in particular, readers who look after stray dogs in their locality, often finding themselves fighting a lonely battle with neighbours who simply can’t understand that kicking and pelting dogs with stones will naturally invite protest by these four-legged creatures. For those readers, the sick politics of a handful of government organisations, of picking up these strays, stuffing them into vans and simply killing them by showing on record that all of them are dangerous (a major reason why the Bangalore mass killings took place), there are portions in the book that are hard to digest. One of the chapters “Lynch Law”, for instance, has Karlekar talking about Bangalore Mahanigar Palike (BMP) teams that captured stray dogs in the most brutal manner. The author states how one dog “was being raised to a van, choking, by a piece of rope, coiled around its neck and throat; the other was being shoved upward, its body pinned against the truck, with a cleft stick pressed against its right ear”. Instances like these are aplenty in the book and frankly if they make you cringe it’s good because, face it, how many books reflect on the state of our country’s street animals? In fact, how many of us would have known the truth behind the Bangalore killings had it not been for this book, which fleshes out a detailed, step-by-step, story of how the murders were executed?
Karlekar’s book also borrows liberally from articles that were published routinely in different newspapers while the carnage went on in Bangalore. Why, the author even cudgels the media in the wake of what happened in Bangalore: “Newspapers began reporting dog bites with much regularity than earlier … A report in The Times of India, Bangalore edition, informed… ‘After Bangalore, it is the turn of Mysore… to fall victim to rabid stray dogs’.” However, the author also picks up other newspaper reports of residents whose pet mongrels went missing in Bangalore in 2007: “… They agreed to return my pet to me… later they told me that my dog had escaped. I suspect they either killed my dog or released him in another area.”
Karlekar’s book is a great one for references, ferreting out instances of what happened in Bangalore and why they happened in the first place. But Savage Humans and Stray Dogs is also a grim reminder of how hopelessly our country continues to disrespect its four-legged citizens. Didn’t Gandhi say that the greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated? Read this book and you’ll see for yourself how weak our nation is today.
SAVAGE HUMAN AND STRAY DOGS
A STUDY IN AGRESSION
Hiranmay Karlekar
Sage Publications
Pages: xiv + 275; Rs 295