Dump Dogs And Aggression In Pakistan

The Pakistan Observer has a brief report (here) about the ongoing problem of aggressive street dogs in Islamabad and Rawalpindi. The residents complain that they feel frightened to walk the streets, particularly at night, adding that the situation is “due to lack of any action against the stray dogs by the civic authorities”.

In this story I can see the usual issues of poor waste management supporting an increasing number of dogs plus the normal attitude that the responsibility belongs to the authorities rather than the residents themselves and perhaps also aggression from people producing aggressive dogs.

However, one comment that particularly caught my eye was from a resident who said that the dogs “are usually seen around garbage heaps during the day”. Although living as scavengers around human communities is in the nature of dogs, it struck me that part of the problem in situations like this may be the separation between the animals and the human residents. These are not village or community dogs, these are dump dogs. They live close to people but probably do not have direct interaction with people on a daily basis. Their reliance on people is indirect and the relationship is impersonal unlike the traditional village situation where both dogs and people know each other as individuals and are bonded through a shared community.

Such understanding of why the human-dog relationship starts to break down cannot in itself offer any immediate relief to the residents of Islamabad or Rawalpindi but does help to create a better picture of the free-living dog’s role in the world. This particularly concerns me because of the danger that all free-living dogs are unfairly tainted by such cases as these aggressive dump dogs in Pakistan.

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)