As scores of people are being treated in local hospitals after they were bitten by stray dogs, whose population in Kashmir Valley has shot up manifold over the past few years, a local pressure group has threatened to launch “kill the rabies” campaign after a fortnight if the authorities fail to check the menace. They will be poisoned or even “beaten to death” by volunteers, it said.
In fact, over a dozen stray dogs were found slain in Srinagar’s Bhagwanpora locality early on Tuesday and almost all had 12-bore gun shots on them. The killings come a week after a 10-year-old local boy was mauled by a horde of stray dogs while returning home from a tuition class. Doctors at city’s Sher-i-Kashmir Institute of Medical Sciences are struggling hard to save the life of Mudassir Wangnoo, the victim who, they said, has received over 100 wounds. The police said they are investigating who targeted the dogs.
There are an estimated over half-a-million stray dogs in Jammu and Kashmir, over 150,000 of them in Srinagar alone, and local newspapers almost every day carry news about residents having been attacked by them. The Srinagar Municipal Corporation (SMC) had two years ago worked out a massive anti-rabies drive during which as many as 100,000 stray dogs were to be poisoned across the winter capital but it was shelved following criticism from animal rights activists who had even warned of legal action.
They, while terming it as “ill-conceived, extra-legal”, had alleged that the drive was launched by proliferating a banned poisonous substance (strychnine) and randomly poisoning all such dogs in brazen contravention of the Poisonous Substances Act, Municipal Act and the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act.