The recent incident in which a nine-year-old school girl was gored by what they called a ‘stray’ cow in Chennai sent shock waves across the State and the country because the video showing the child being hurled up in the air went viral. Of course this is not the first time a child or an adult gets hurt in an animal attack on a city street – in rural areas such instances of man-animal conflict are common occurrences - but this incident drew the attention of authorities because of the traction it got on social media.
But can that cow, or those like her on the roads of Chennai, be actually called ‘stray’ as newspapers described her? Because the word stray is used for animals that have no owners or if the owner is not known. It means that the animal was on its own, eking out a living on whatever was available on the streets where they forage for food. In this particular goring incident that took place at Arumbakkam, a thickly populated locality, the animal had an owner, who was subsequently arrested on the charges of endangering the lives of the members of the public.
In fact, that particularly angry cow, who seemed to have attacked the child without any provocation, was part of a herd that roamed the streets, sharing the space with human beings and automobiles throughout the day. Though the incident came as a wakeup call to the Corporation authorities who later on rounded up cattle roaming around the city and locked them up in pounds, it is not that the streets have become cattle-free. Even the announcement that more pounds would be set up by the Corporation, whose one of the key responsibilities is to make the city roads safe for people and vehicles, and a drive would be launched to remove stray animals from the roads, just looked like a knee-jerk reaction with no indication of long term commitment to resolve the menace of stray animals.
The reaction also raises the question as to what the authorities were doing up to this point of time to tackle the problem. Were they not aware of the existence of the pounds and haven't they spotted cattle roaming the streets? In fact the very same rogue cow of Arumbakkam, local people alleged, was only a repeat offender that had gored several people in the past and was still walking the streets with its head held high. Why no one, including the owner, bothered to rein in the cow?
In fact, another unsubstantiated charge that emanated from the locality was that the owner was injecting the animal with some steroids or something like that to enhance lactation. Of course the cow was walking with its calf on the road when it suddenly turned to hit the girl, which is a confirmation that the owner was making money by selling the milk of the cow. The public suggested that his greed of getting more milk out of the cow impelled him to inject that drug that turned the cow wild.
Whatever the truth is, it is a clear indication of the way many owners illtreat their milch cows. They do not provide shelter for them and many do not even feed them properly. Cattle pulling out wall posters and chewing them up used to be a common sight when posters were allowed to be pasted on the walls. Now that posters are not allowed on walls – they only adorn some road dividers, electricity junction boxes and temporary partitions – the cattle perhaps vie with dogs, also of the stray variety, for food. The only difference between most of the cattle and the dogs is that the dogs roam the streets day in and day out with no place to return to by dusk.
The cows have owners who will be eagerly waiting for their homecoming as they had to be milked at dawn. In the case of stray dogs, almost all of them have no owners and hence no permanent place of stay, though they might have ganged up as packs and marked their own territories along the roadside, not letting rival packs enter their domain. Mostly the dogs live around places where they have opportunities to ransack the garbage bins/dumps and get a steady supply of leftovers or where they are fed by kind-hearted animal lovers. Those packs of dogs also indulge in fierce dogfights on the roads and pavements frightening passersby and even endangering their lives.
Yet, rarely do we see stray dogs being removed from roads nowadays. Of course, we have once seen dogcatchers with their net or the catchpoles to trap the unsuspecting animals. The trapped dogs would be dumped in ramshackle vans that drove straight to some culling site. That practice of killing stray dogs had earned the wrath of animal lovers who come in many forms – as international non-profit organisations, local outfits and also concerned individuals or groups – and therefore seems to be discontinued. So the dogcatcher is more or less a relic now – those vans were anyway derelicts that might have been junked – and the stray dogs have a free run.
In fact, any attempt to disturb those dogs from their ‘habitats’ that could be the pavements outside some eateries or some lonely public streets would only earn the wrath of the animal lovers, whose numbers are also growing day by day, keeping pace with the stray dogs and stray cattle. So, some old practices like removing dogs without a collar belt from the road and taking stray cattle to pounds have become a thing of the past while their need is still there, perhaps more sharply pronounced in the face of rapid proliferation of the populations of all the tree kinds - human, canine and bovine in the urban settlements!
