Nayeema Ahmad Mahjoor
While reading this story, which I am sure will interest you, please make sure you take care of humans before bringing a pet into the house.
Every time I travel abroad, I get homesick. Soon, I dream of my relations, as cold as ice; my filthy streets; people at railway platforms eating on leaves; political discourses with fights and fists; and never-ending violent encounters, which have become countless.
Strange this time: my recent trip to Paris made me miss no one but my street dogs. Knowing that their increasing incidents of bites, barking, and chasing have resulted in many casualties, creating another kind of terror in civil line areas, I still missed them.
Let me confess, though.
I started to envy European dogs when I found them living with families, enjoying proper homes, packed food, and vet care. Even they get birthday cards, picnic treats, and gifts on festivals like Christmas and Easter. They listen and act like humans, and their loyalty is beyond any doubt.
There are no stray dogs in European streets; if any are found, local councils take them into care immediately. Properly organised agencies look after dogs, and many charities own or adopt them or pay for their lifetime care. This kind of cultural invasion has yet to reach my hometown.
One of my friends in London, Christina, spent a whole week buying Christmas gifts for family, but two weeks buying gifts for dogs, cats, and other pets, for which she had started budgeting six months in advance because pet gifts are more expensive than gifts for human beings.
Look at our poor dogs wandering on the Kashmiri streets. They hardly get food, a place, or love, not to mention gifts. It upsets me. Millions of our people suffer from hunger. When will it be our turn to feed the dogs?
A few years back, we heard that Smt. Maneka Gandhi had initiated a plan to care for stray dogs and expressed concern that they were being mistreated in Kashmir.
As a community, we shared her concern and pledged to gift every single dog to make her initiative successful, but I don’t know why she lost interest so soon and didn’t give us a chance to show our magnanimity.
It is not true that we mistreat dogs. It is the other way around; our lives and streets are under their control. They have become deputy masters. You know their boss already.
What if we have some curses for canines? When we have to snub somebody who is annoying us, we call him “Houn loot hui chukh” or “hoon sind peth chukh khewan” (you are a dog-tail or you are eating like a dog), etc. But we never beat them or mistreat them. At times, we become animal lovers and feed them all leftover food.
Women’s complaints have been pouring in recently that the dog population is increasing and might soon outnumber Kashmiris. But hey! Who cares? This is Kashmir? It is open for all, calm and cosy for everybody.
Street dogs have been well fed by security personnel since the day our streets and dwellings became their permanent bunkers. Most of the time, it was not the security personnel we feared. It was their well-fed, loyal dogs who made our lives hell. They restricted our movements from home to the mosque to the office.
“Dogs are more loyal than humans”. I have heard it since my childhood. It has been proved wrong in Kashmir. Our dogs defected in no time, a few decades ago. They became closer to the security bunkers and threatened to maul us the moment they saw us walking near the bunker or even looking at the concertina wire barricades.
Somebody has said that poverty begets more children… Again, we have been proved wrong so far as our dogs are concerned. When our dogs were fed a little leftover food, they remained under control. The moment security personnel stuffed them with plenty of lentils and chapattis, the population exploded, soon to outnumber humans.
Many of our neighbours who like dogs stopped by to feed them, including one of my close relatives who was fond of dogs and would feed them all the leftover food in the evenings, against his wife’s wishes. The relationship between the couple became so strained and tense over this issue that elders had to be called to fix the marriage break-up. They had to whisk away all three dogs that used to live behind the shed in the house. The wife soon became an admirer of Maneka Gandhi after hearing that she was taking dogs out of Kashmir. It seemed like she had become her saviour to save her marriage.
Look at European dogs……
When I witnessed wealthy people in Europe spending millions on gifts for their dogs, I had a few questions for the invisible force that people often say lives in that space. “How do you distribute wealth among your subjects? Why are millions of Africans scavenging for food? Why must children as young as four or five beg for a few morsels on the streets of South Asia? Why are dogs so rich in Europe?”
While whispering to myself in one of the big shopping malls in Europe, I felt very distressed, which my friend noticed. She gave me a quizzical look.
Many governments in European countries have advised their health departments to encourage people to go for long walks, join gyms for exercise, or take their dogs for walks to get both fit, thereby placing a minimal burden on health services. Moreover, it will reduce depression among humans and dogs.
My habit of morning walk makes my depression more severe instead of lessening it.
Going for a walk in Kashmir has become more fatal than the bullet. I have encountered many people with big sticks or twigs while on a morning walk, yet some have been bitten or mauled by dogs every day. Since people don’t bite back at dogs, this is no news to the media.
When the whole population is consumed by constant bloodshed, encounters, and funerals, who would care for dogs, making life hell for mosque-goers or walkers on the streets of Kashmir?
We see kids dying or being bitten by dogs every other day on the streets, but because they are Kashmiri streets, nobody seems interested.
The ongoing conflict has changed our lives to such an abnormality that every normality of life or routine now seems something from another planet. Dogs leave people mauled every other day. Still, we have no time to take it seriously compared to what has become our routine in the last four decades.
Animal lovers! Believe me, it is not a story of canines; it is a story of humans who live under many threats. And a new threat comes from the growing canine population.
Nayeema Ahmad Mahjoor is a senior journalist, author and columnist.
