Speciesism & Strays: The Price Of Our Vanity

In 1828, America elected its new President,

Andrew Jackson

, who in his 1829 inaugural address announced a policy to “relocate” the native Indians to make more land available to the white settlers. In 1830, the US Congress passed the Indian Removal Act to carry out this agenda and remove the native Indians to the west of Mississippi. This was brutally and forcibly done using the US army, resulting in the deaths of about 10,000 native people – thus naming it the “Trail of Tears”.One such horrific incident was narrated by a young French writer Alexis De Tocqueville in his book Democracy in America: In the freezing winter of 1831, in the town of Memphis, a group of natives called the Choctaws arrived on the left bank of the Mississippi river, waiting for a ship to ferry them to the right bank, where they had been promised asylum by the US govt.These Indians travelled with their families and their loyal companions – their domesticated dogs. When they began to board the ferry, the captain refused to let the dogs enter. The Indians left with no choice, got on and left the dogs on the shore. As soon as the dogs understood that their human companions were leaving forever they all started howling, loudly and in unison. When the boat went further away from the bank, all the dogs jumped in the frigid waters and started to swim after the boat. As the boat moved further down, the legs of the dogs eventually gave way and one by one they drowned in the icy Mississippi river, yearning to only reconnect with their masters.This is an animal that is being reviled and vilified these days but the “problem of stray dogs” is just a symptom and not the disease itself. The disease is that of us humans thinking that since we are on the top of the food chain, it makes us masters of earth. This owner of the nature complex, in light of the current

stray dogs

issue, is manifested by one glaring fault of our own – that we have a major fetish for the “imported breed”. We have a fixation to our arbitrary idea of beauty and hanker over “imported” or “purebreed” dogs, refusing to adopt a stray puppy from the streets. For example, after the ubiquitous Vodafone advertisement, the sales of the pug sky-rocketed. However, this purebreed is a myth because most of these breeds do not even exist in nature and are a result of the incestuous eugenics movement in Europe 1860s onwards, where we indulged in genetic manipulation for our amusement. That means forcibly mating fathers and daughters or mothers and sons to maintain a certain look of the breed. So when someone says purebred, you should hear inbred. The result is that these dogs are born with a plethora of congenital diseases and soon die of organ failure. One cannot visit a vet without a terminal liver or kidney failure pug standing in line before you. And since most people consider these poor creatures as things to dispose of at the first sign of malfunction, they dump them in NGOs, who then are forced to take care of them and this diverts precious resources from actually running an on ground sterilisation programme.Many cynophobes are stridently advocating a knee-jerk reaction like impounding stray dogs or worse culling them. A far better, more humane, cheaper and easier to implement solution would be simply ban all dog breeding and purchase. If a person wants to keep a pet then the only option is to adopt what is affectionately called an “Indie” from the streets. They are 100% all-natural dogs and more suited to the Indian climate as opposed to some who insist on getting let’s say a husky, which is a dog with its origin in the frozen desert of Siberia! This will kick in a virtuous cycle as the stray dogs population reduces and NGOs will get resources freed to aggressively implement sterilisation. A milder step would be to incentivise adoption of dogs as pets from shelters by levying a high tax on store-bought dogs. This along with policies such CNVR (Collect, Neuter, Vaccinate, Return) programme has made Netherlands the first zero-stray-dogs country in the world!A stray dog is not a just dog, it is a sign of our failure and our stubborn belief in

speciesism

. It is an externality of us not effectively implementing our legally mandated duty of Animal Birth Control and our arbitrary construct of beauty, which says that a husky or a pug is more adorable than an indie. ABC might not be a panacea, nor maybe the banning of “purebreed” but they will certainly go a long way in making a major dent in the stray dogs situation.The writer is advocate, Supreme Court