‘Carnivorous’ canines still terrorise UP villages

The state govt woke up to the danger after the media highlighted that 14 children have been mauled to death since January. A 4-member special team from Mathura is now using drones to spot and capture stray dogs but some vets say the real culprits are wolves and not dogs.

Sitapur: Dog, they say, is man's best friend but in Talgaon village in Uttar Pradesh’s Khairabad town, the very sound of a barking dog sends a chill down the spine.

Children are huddled back into houses, goats are taken in and the doors are firmly shut.

It was on May 1 that three children, all below 10 years of age, were mauled to death by stray dogs. The incidents took place in Sitapur’s Tikari village, Gurpalia village and Koila village around the same time. The children, two boys and a girl, had ventured out alone when they were attacked and killed by a pack of dogs which have allegedly turned carnivorous and are attacking humans after the closure of illegal slaughter houses that earlier fed them discarded meat.

Two days after the May 1 triple attack by the canines, another boy was killed in Talgaon village. Local people, enraged by official inaction, shot dead three dogs the following day and beat 10 more to death.

In Govindsarai, Gurpalia, Tikari, Newada, Saraiya, Rahimabad and Badri Kheda villages, parents have stopped sending children to school and even playgrounds.

In adjoining villages, parents accompany the children to school and bring them back. In cases where parents cannot accompany the children to school, attendance has dropped sharply.

Sanjay Kumar, principal of government primary school in Saraiya, confirmed that there has been a 50 per cent decline in attendance since May 2.

Dharmendra Singh of Rahimabad village said, “We never had problems with stray dogs. In fact, people would feed these stray dogs because they barked and alerted us whenever an outsider entered the village. The change of canine behavior began since January and in the past five months, 14 children have been mauled to death.”

When the media highlighted the issue, the state government woke up to the danger.

Uttar Pradesh minister Rita Bahuguna Joshi, who is in charge of Sitapur district, visited Khairabad with a team of forest officials over the weekend and set up two teams — one under additional director, health, Atul Misra, and the other under joint director, animal husbandry, J.D. Gautam, to tackle the crisis.

A four-member special team has also been called from Mathura to capture the dogs but it is facing problems. Stray dogs, sensing trouble, are known to go into hiding as soon as the dog-catching team arrives in a village. District magistrate Sheetal Varma has now allowed the teams to use drones to spot the stray dogs. City magistrate, Sitapur, Harsh Deo Pandey said that 30 dogs had been captured till the last weekend. Area residents, however, alleged that these teams capture stray dogs and then release them in nearby forests from where the they  return to villages within hours.

“Besides, the government teams are not technically equipped to catch these dangerous dogs that have turned carnivores from being omnivores. Officials themselves run a mile when they see a pack of dogs. They do not even have the traps needed to catch dogs,” said Khalid whose nephew Qasim, 9, was killed by dogs last week.

The local people attribute the change in canine behavior to the closure of illegal slaughter houses in the district.

“The stray dogs used to eat the meat that was discarded by slaughter houses and, over the years, they became carnivorous. After the closure of slaughter houses, these dogs get no food. That is why they have turned ferocious and attack children who cannot defend themselves,” said Umesh Pratap Singh, a local farmer.

Some veterinary experts, on the other hand, feel that it is not stray dogs that are attacking children. “They are actually Indian wolves that look like dogs. With the rapid reduction in forest cover and the increase in man-animal conflict, these wolves are entering villages and preying on children,” said Dr Vinod Varma, a local vet.

Villagers, however, refuse to accept this and claim that the stray dogs can be heard barking. “We know how wolves howl but these are definitely dogs,” said Mr Khalid.