Stray Dog Menace In India Poem by Venkateswaran Krishnan Sreenivasan

Have you ever dwelt upon our street dog menace
And the confused thinking of the populace
About the risk to life the victims face
Due to bite of these rabid strays?

You find them on the street where you dump your waste
Food residues, in bad taste
Near meat shops and mounds of garbage
Thrown by the street walkers in a rage

The pedestrian and the biker in their morning ramble
Are greeted by the threatening canine snarl
Waylaid and often suffer a savage maul
Or bite and fear of rabies, a dreadful gamble

Our people lived happily in the earlier years
Free from fear of wandering strays
Dogcatchers with noose roamed here and there
And no garbage littered everywhere

Cow slaughter is lawful but killing dogs is taboo
This law enforced in 2001 tends to woo
The animal lovers who will sue you
If you ever kill a dog in public view

Our country is host to the largest number of strays
That roam and bite people in their forays
Afflicted with rabies in a year, twenty thousand die
A third of the global total, a figure quite high

Kerala has a plan to herd these strays into a forest
Enclosure in a compound for the rest
Of their life, vaccinate and sterilize the male
But all this remains on paper and becomes stale

To adopt the street dog as a puppy
And rear it like a baby as your hobby
Recruit the able bodied in police as your buddy
Are novel plans on the anvil under study

Confusion prevails on the subject among the lawmakers
With impracticable ideas that have no takers
If the aforesaid plans fail to make a thaw
Go back fourteen years and revoke the law