India is home to more than 75 million street and community dogs, many of whom live in relative harmony with people. But there is still a high incidence of dog bites across the country, and virtually all cases of human rabies in India, which may cause many thousands of deaths each year,* are linked to dog bites. According to the World Health Organization, about 30 to 60% of reported rabies cases and deaths in India occur in children under the age of 15 years.
Indiscriminate culling of dogs is often a knee-jerk response to dealing with human rabies cases. Dog culls do nothing, however to actually solve the issue, and instead cause immense animal suffering.
For more than a decade, our Humane Society International colleagues in India have been working toward humane alternatives to cruel and indiscriminate culls, promoting peaceful co-existence between street dogs and people and vaccinating and sterilizing more than 200,000 dogs and cats across the country. HSI/India has been working in the city of Vadodara since September 2017 and along with the Vadodara Municipal Corporation, successfully achieved the milestone of spaying, neutering and vaccinating 86% of the city’s entire street dog population, the highest achieved by any Indian city ever. This dog sterilization rate has now maintained for two years running.
A new pilot project expands on this success in a fun and innovative way. In Vadodara, HSI/India engaged 30 preschoolers, ages 3 to 6 years, in a pilot project that uses a giant game of slides and ladders to teach them about street dog behavior and safety.
Mayur Waghela for HSI
In the life-sized board game, some common negative interactions with street dogs are represented by the slides; these include throwing stones at street dogs and playing with street puppies near their mother, which can put children in danger. Ladders, on the other hand, represent positive actions children and adults can take to keep communities and pups safe, such as encouraging dog and cat sterilization and vaccinations to reduce and maintain healthy animal populations, keeping a distance from sleeping dogs and mothers with puppies, and seeking medical help if bites do happen rather than using home remedies.
The game aims to engage both children and their parents and other adults in broader street dog welfare and safety activities to foster harmonious coexistence for generations to come. The team hopes to bring the game to all state-run nurseries in the city, which serve some of Vadodara’s most economically and socially vulnerable communities.
“Given that children are most vulnerable to dog bites, our interactive game not only educates them on how to be safe with street dogs but also fosters a deeper understanding within the wider community of how we can change both human and dog behavior to achieve a more peaceful coexistence,” said Parul Dholakia, HSI/India’s assistant manager of community engagement. “We believe that by instilling these values early on, we can create a more compassionate and responsible society with fewer incidents.”
This is just one way we are working with children to raise awareness about dog behavior and safety. Since 2018, the community engagement team has been organizing dog behavior workshops throughout the city’s neighborhoods and in schools. The workshop includes a stuffed toy dog named Jimmy, a picture book with images of different behaviors and scenarios. Often friendly street dogs watching the gathering will come and sit with the group and inadvertently become a part of the workshop. Since 2018, HSI/India has organized 251 children’s workshops across three cities (Vadodara, Dehradun and Lucknow) with more than 6,891 children participating to learn how to understand and appropriately respond to a dog’s behavior.
Jaydeep Rathva, a 14-year-old from the Lalbahadur School, said that he “learned what to do and what not to do around street dogs. For example, I learned that one has to gain the trust of a mother dog before playing with her puppies.”
Nitesh Vasava/HSI
I’m immensely proud of the work our team in India is doing across so many communities to create a more humane world for children and animals.
Follow Kitty Block @HSUSKittyBlock.
*Editor’s note: A previous version of this blog post cited the numbers of deaths caused by rabies in India estimated by the World Health Organization, however there is reason to believe that gathering accurate numbers may be difficult, so we have adjusted the language here.
