“Our New Year resolution was to end the dog menace in our village,” said a 37-year-old shop owner from Bhavanipet village in Telangana’s Kamareddy district. The “solution” the villagers – about 60 to 70 families – had was to get rid of stray dogs with the aid of “fixers” or local pest controllers.
In Kamareddy alone, over 100 dogs were killed this week, local police officials said. In Hanamkonda district, 120 dogs were killed.
The Telangana police have booked 15 people, including six village sarpanches of Hanamkonda and Kamareddy districts under Section 325 (killing or poisoning of animals) of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS) and the Prevention of Cruelty towards Animals Act.
“I met with an accident while being chased by a dog two months ago. There are children who have suffered dog bites. What are we to do other than to get rid of them?” the villager, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said.
The sarpanch, who has been booked, said, “It was the collective decision of all villagers. I just did not stand in their way. How is that a crime?”
From Kamareddy, a video of a man injecting dogs surfaced on Tuesday. A villager who claimed his six-year-old son was chased by a dog on his way back from school said, “We needed assurance from the government that they will tackle the dog problem”.
At least 16 sarpanches, who are independent candidates backed by different political parties informally, had promised to end the stray dog menace this year. “They asked for votes with this promise. When that did not happen, pest controllers were brought in,” a villager said.
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“Every year, 10 to 15 people complain of dog bites. We could not have ignored the problem,” a sarpanch, who was booked along with her husband, claimed.
Animal rights activists, however, decried the inhuman and illegal manner in which the dogs were killed.
In Hanamkonda’s Shayampet and Arepally gram panchayat limits alone, nine people were booked. “We got a complaint from a local animal welfare NGO and discovered a mass grave filled with about 120 dog carcasses,” a senior police official from Hanamkonda said. The two districts not reported rabies cases in the past year, district administration authorities said.
In Arepally village, a local politician said that he would support the sarpanches in fighting the legal case.
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Till last year, dog catchers were employed to clear villages of strays. Most dogs which were caught returned to the same villages after vaccination and sterilisation. “We made several representations during the past two years to district collectors and other district administration staff, but all this fell on deaf ears,” a villager claimed.
The ruling Congress party in Telangana did not officially comment on the killings, despite claiming in December that the sarpanches backed by them had swept the elections. “We have told all elected representatives to be kind to animals even as they safeguard the lives of their constituents,” a Congress leader said.
The BJP and BRS, too, remained silent. “We do not want people to break the law,” a BJP leader simply said.
