People Provoke Dog Bites in Bangalore

In contrast to the usual newspaper reports about the “stray dog menace” in India that I have complained about recently here is a report from The Times of India that contains the following statement from a senior official, “90%-95% of dog bites in the city were on account of provocation by children or adults”. The rest of the article concerns measures to deal with healthy but aggressive dogs. I was pleased to see this quote because the more typical attitude seems to be that any dog bite is the result of an aggressive attack on innocent people. Acceptance that in most cases the dogs are reacting to human actions is a big step towards being able to reduce the number of bites through educating people rather than assuming that any dog on the street is a problem.

Not provoking dogs can reduce aggression in two ways. Firstly, there the direct retaliation against the provocation, and secondly, the dogs that get provoked are more nervous around people and thereby are likely react aggressively more quickly. Remove the provocation and the dog population will be more relaxed. 

Learn more about the lives and issue of unowned dogs in my e-book ”A Stray View” available from Bangkok Books (readable as .pdf on any computer)