Who mentioned, ‘dog bites man’ isn’t any information? It was world information final week when Moldovan President Maia Sandu’s pup bit Austrian President Alexander van der Bellen’s hand at a tripartite summit with Slovenia, known as to debate Moldova’s entry into the European Union. Luckily, the elderly Austrian was no Hitler, Stalin or Dollfuss who, if handled so like a canine, would have blocked Moldova’s EU entry. He was forgiving, and gifted the excitable pup a toy.
Diplomacy goes to the dogs. Vladimir Putin boasted to visiting George W. Bush that his Labrador retriever Konni was “bigger, stronger and faster” than Bush’s Scottish terrier. He even set Konni upon Angela Merkel, who hated dogs. Joe Biden’s and Boris Johnson’s dogs have mounted on their guards and visitors, although bites of the sort that van der Bellen suffered at Chisinau haven’t been reported from Downing Street or the Kremlin.
Unless on a decent leash, dogs can mar political ties. Among the numerous grouses that Deve Gowda had towards Congress president Sitaram Kesri, which led to the autumn of the Gowda regime, was that Kesri used to let his Pomeranian roam free within the room even when the 2 had been speaking issues of state. More not too long ago, Himanta Biswa Sarma was peeved that Rahul Gandhi was paying extra consideration to feeding his canine Pidi when he known as on the latter, than to his litany of grievances from Assam. Sarma walked out with out even a canine whine, and smelled his means into the BJP. Since then it has been canine days for the Congress within the northeast.
India’s present concern will not be about such topdogs, however about dogs who chew folks like us, the underdogs. Open town pages of your morning paper, and you will notice tales aplenty about road dogs biting morning strollers, neighbour’s terrier biting child in a raise, a company honcho dying of head damage sustained whereas fleeing road dogs, and extra. Every chew takes a couple of bytes on the information tv, too, the place you might even hear the cries of the bitten, and the barks of canine lovers who resist efforts to finish the road canine menace.
‘Dog bites man’ is nationwide information. A city council in Kerala, fed up with ill-fed dogs biting morning strollers and shocked by a stray canine mauling an autistic baby to loss of life, moved the courtroom in search of to strike down Maneka Gandhi’s animal contraception (ABC) guidelines, and in search of powers to kill, cull or curb road dogs. The Punjab and Haryana High courtroom ordered the state to pay Rs10,000 for each canine tooth that had entered the flesh of a person, and Rs20,000 for each 0.2 cm of torn flesh.
Earlier, municipalities had been allowed to mercy-kill dogs in order that city roads and parks could possibly be saved protected. In 2001 Maneka, then a junior minister within the A.B. Vajpayee authorities, notified the ABC guidelines which disallowed dog-catching and mercy-killing, each of which had been allowed underneath the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals act. Under the foundations, amended minorly this 12 months, road dogs who chew can on the most be caught and vaccinated, however must be set again into streets.
Six crore dogs—the “mongrel, puppy, whelp, and hound, and curs of low degree,” as Oliver Goldsmith put it in An Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog—are presently stalking our streets, giving wounds “both sore and sad” to 2 crore Indians yearly. Dog-bite rabies is killing extra Indians than is malaria, but animal lovers wouldn’t hear of even a mad mongrel being killed.
The irony, says the kill-the-mad-dog foyer, is: it’s lawful to kill a man-eating tiger in uncommon circumstances, however you may land in jail should you kill a mad canine.
