Killing stray dogs is not the solution - Chinny Krishna

by Saman Waterval

Prior to 2006, the reduction of the stray dog population to control rabies was governed by the Rabies Act where the method adopted was the destruction of the animals, which was both cruel and inhuman. This method was proven totally ineffective, says Chinny Krishna, a trustee director of the World Society for the Protection of Animals.

"Killing stray dogs is not the solution", he said.

It a moral obligation that all animals, domesticated or wild, should be protected from cruelty at the hands of man, he said at a news conference organized by theAnimal Welfare trust (AWT) in Colombo last week.

At the beginning, stray dogs were captured and killed in a cruel way. Not only was it was cruel, but it was clear that killing the animals was not the solution, he noted.

"Dogs are very territorial — when you remove a dog from his environment, another dog will take his place. Even at the time when they killed dogs, there wasn’t a drop in the number of people getting rabies. This shows that they treated the problem was ineffective", Krishna pointed out.

He said that people and dogs had co-existed for more than 40,000 years. "So don’t break this bond. It’s not people or animals, it’s people and animals".

According to Krishna, who lives in India, the situation in his country has seen a change because of the Animal Birth Control program. Dogs get pulled off the street, get vaccinated and sterilized and transported back to the area they came from.

"This is the most effective and cheapest way on a long- term", he pointed out. "At first, we would kill all the dogs, but then we created a cat problem. So, we killed all the cats which, in turn, caused a rat problem. This led a plaque after so many years".

"So again, killing the dogs wasn’t the solution. There was only one thing we discovered by using this method — that there was no end in sight", Krishna said. "We then started to not only sterilize the dogs, but also register breeding to control the population".

Ms. Visakha Tillekeratne, Trustee of the Animal Welfare Trust claimed that stray dogs are still killed despite the No Kill policy adopted since 2006 under President Mahinda Rajapaksa.

"We don’t have stray dogs, we have community dogs. That means someone looks out for it, it’s friendly and not fearsome", she explained.

"Globally, it has been proven it’s possible to make a change. The media can make a difference. A lot of people are not briefed or wrongly briefed about this situation", she said.

She advocated a civil society dialogue. "It is only together that we can make a difference".

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