Memories of a Little Girl Called Dolly! (XXV)

The man came from the BMC and enquired about our problems. He said, “First, common people should stop feeding the street dogs. Meat and fish are openly disposed and the dustbins are open. That is why the dogs survive. How much can the BMC do? You all feed the dogs on one hand and blame the BMC on the other.”

He also said that they would be sending dog vans and sterilizing the female dogs. Mom asked, “Why don’t you catch all of them and take them away?”

He replied that they create territory problems.

Mom said, “Sterilize the male dogs as well, so that within sometime all the population of the dogs will be gone.”

The man said, “Animal lovers don’t allow it.”

Animal lovers should think about how much these dogs suffer on the streets. They even torture human beings. 2 cases had happened just then. A scrap-picker was torn to pieces by street dogs. People came to know about it after 3-4 hours. By the time he was taken to the hospital, he was dead. The son of a school teacher was also killed by these dogs, while he was playing outside.

We told him about these incidents. He promised to take care and left after giving us his phone number.

The problem persisted. Children stopped going out to play. When we called the man over the phone, he was never available there. Thus Dolly’s mother went to the political party leader, whom we had contacted before and shouted, “You come home when there are elections to beg for our votes. But, you never solve our problems.”

Then the leader placed some poisoned meat behind our building the next day, which we did not know. 7-8 dogs went to eat that meat. 2 dogs roaming about our building barked the others away. The other dogs did have some of the poisoned meat. But these 2 had the maximum. Sometime later for 4-5 hours their barking was in such a miserable way that we could not hear it. Soon they died. We do not know what happened to the other dogs.

Dolly’s mother informed the political party leader and got the dead bodies cleared. Everybody felt very bad. Probably, the dogs had wailed some days back for these deaths they said. For a few days the other dogs were also not seen. However, our building was not happy with the way the political party people had removed the dogs. Some sadness prevailed there.

The political party people came home and requested us not to give this story to the newspaper. They had taken this step because Dolly’s mother had pestered them.

When Dolly came home, she said, “Kutte ko mar diya. Bure log! Yeh achcha nahin kiya.”

To be continued…