SPEAKER_03 0:00

In a span of just seven years, the state has witnessed a doubling of dogbite cases. In 2024, Keller reported 3,16,000 dogbite cases, a dramatic rise from the 1,35,000 incidents in 2017. In 2024, the number of rabies deaths stood at 22. And in 25, it has been estimated at 13.

SPEAKER_01 0:20

More breaking news coming in. The directions follow the Supreme Court's homal cognizance taken on the 28th of July after media reports on the death of six-year-old Chavi Sharma from rabies in Delhi's Poot Khalin area came out. Chavi was bitten on the 30th of June by a rabbit dog and succumbed on the 26th of July despite treatment.

SPEAKER_03 0:47

The bite came from a stray dog in July. Mambad Nasritin was bitten on his right leg near Khafur Side Street on the 28th of July. He immediately received the RIG, which is rabies immunoglobulin, and the first dose of anti-rabies vaccine at Raipata government hospital. But he later completed all remaining ERB doses, but he died.

SPEAKER_00 1:16

She skips follow-up vaccinations, and six months later, she died from rabies. A six-year-old girl in Delhi gets attacked by a stray dog. She gets bitten multiple times. And this time her family does everything right. She gets all the necessary vaccinations, and yet she still died. In 2024, India recorded 37 lakh, 15,713, or 3.7 million dog bite cases. Data from that same year showed that 54 people died from rabies, but that number only included those who were formally admitted, diagnosed, and died within a government facility. It doesn't speak to the number of people who died at home, in villages without clinics, or in places where no official report could have been filed. The real number is certainly higher. While some frame rabies as a public health crisis, others consider it a story about animal welfare, and others still a history of colonialism. The dog is one of the oldest companions humanity has ever known. So how did it become one of India's most dangerous public health problems? And more importantly, who is at fault? Right now in India, that answer entirely depends on who you ask. The free roaming street dog of India stems from one of the oldest human-animal relationships in history. Dogs have been human companions since the Mesolithic Age, otherwise known as the Stone Age. This was between 10,000 BCE and 4000, 5000 BCE, which began at the end of the very last ice age. Domestication happened before the rise of agriculture when hunters and gatherers were still preying on large animals and moving across the landscape. These were small bands of humans who were moving constantly and surviving off of what they could hunt and forage. Alongside humans, grey wolf populations began exhibiting increased habituation near human civilizations, and the leading theory states that the least fearful of the wolves understood that being in close proximity to humans meant having more reliable food sources. And over generations, the wolves that got closest to humans were the ones that survived and reproduced. They were essentially selecting themselves for domestication related to the proximity to human life. Dogs were the first animals that humans domesticated. Dogs helped humans track and hunt prey, increasing their efficiency. Other animals, like sheep, goat, and cattle, only became domesticated once humans began taking part in agriculture. Dogs became a part of how we moved, how we hunted, and how we settled. The earliest depictions of dogs are present in Indian art dating back 9,000 years, found in the Bean Bagta rock shelters near Bhopal, or present-day Madhya Pradesh. The art in those rock shelters carry hundreds of paintings that depict various interactions between humans and animals like the dog. They unmistakably showcase that human and dog relationships have been established in India for years. Later in Hinduism, India's largest religion, dogs appear in epics like the Mahabharata and Ramayana. In the Mahabharata, stories have been told about the unbreakable and loyal bond shared between humans and dogs. Hindu beliefs also include a manifestation of the destroyer, Shiva, as Bhairava, and his vehicle of choice is a fierce black dog. That was until the British colonization of India. The British ruled and occupied India from 1757 to 1947, mainly driven by economic exploitation and the utilization of Indian resources. India was viewed as a rich source for materials essential for British industrialization, such as cotton, tea, spices, and opium. Under British rule, India's share of global industrial output dropped to nearly 2%, while Britain's share of the world economy tripled. Alongside economic extraction, colonization was characterized by the desire to civilize and urbanize a community seen as unruly, often viewing elements of Indian life through the lens of superiority. The British understood India as a place that required European guidance and classification to become civilized. Before the British came to India, native Indian dog species lived alongside families, often inside or closely attached to homes, where they acted as hunters and protectors. However, the British had their own idea of what a proper dog should look like, pedigreed and European. And the native Indian dog most families had did not fit that image. So the British named the dogs just that, the pariah dog, a term whose ideology comes from Perea, the name of a caste-oppressed community. In the British colonial imagination, native Indian dogs used to be painted to be an unsightly nuisance and were treated as forms of living evidence to justify Indian uncleanliness and degeneration. The Indian pariah dog, one that was capable of being well trained and intelligent, was intentionally downgraded by the British Raj or the British Crown when merchants wanted to sell European dog breeds within the country instead. Maharajas, or kings, began importing foreign dogs to replace their native hunting dogs, and the Indian middle class followed. The British imported breeds like the retriever, pointer, mastiff, terriers, and more, and expelled breeds like the Rajapaliam, Mudolhound, and Rampur Hound, all of which were fierce hunting dogs to the street. These dogs formed the population of Indian free roaming dogs. For thousands of years, this was the relationship established between dogs and humans. The dog acted as the companion, guardian, and even a sacred being. And then something changed around the culture of how dogs became perceived due to British colonial ideas. Additionally, something else changed. Not the dog, but the disease it carried. A virus so old it appeared in ancient texts, and a virus so lethal that when symptoms appear, it is always too late. The dog became dangerous because a disease had found it, and humans never quite figured out how to respond. What is rabies? Rabies is a zoonotic disease, meaning it is maintained in animals but infects humans. It is a progressive neurological infection caused by the rabies lysovirus, which travels from the site of the bite to the brain through the nervous system. The incubation period, or the time between the bite and when symptoms appear, can vary anywhere from two weeks to six years. Typically, symptoms show up between one and three months. The range between two weeks and six years is what makes the disease so dangerous. The variability is scary. Once symptoms appear, such as confusion, fever, aggression, and the inability to swallow water, it is almost always fatal. Compared to other animals like squirrels, rats, or even bats, dogs have been the most important vector for the rabies virus in relation to spreading the disease to humans. Their bites account for around 99% of all human rabies cases. Rabies is also a global issue, and the disease kills around 59,000 people per year. In India alone, it is estimated there are around 20,000 human deaths a year, which is significantly higher than most countries. The disease itself has existed throughout human history for many years. Rabies was first mentioned in the Law Code of Ishannah, which are legal texts that date back to the old Babylonian period. The tablets from this time suggest that if your dog shows signs of rabies and bites someone who then dies, you, the owner, will be heavily fined. For most of human history, if you got bitten by a rapid dog, there was nothing anyone could do about it to prevent death. Roman physicians have been documented to recommend cauterizing or burning the wound to drain. And that was the treatment for around 1800 years. The next colonial era solution to solving the rabies crisis was the practice of culling. Culling was the state's response towards rabies, and it was the systematic killing of dog populations. Culling was a practice that extended from the beginning of the colonial period to the early 2000s. It was first practiced in Britain and once proved to be effective there, it was brought to India. In 1791, 34 years into British rule, early records show that people could receive rewards for every pariah dog they killed in Kolkata. The reward was one anna, which equates to one sixteenth of an Indian rupee, and transactions were usually paid out using copper pieces. This reward had massive value at the time, as most unskilled workers earned anywhere from one to one and a half annas a day. So it was an attractive financial incentive to participate in the culling efforts. The people doing the actual culling were mostly lower caste laborers. The colonial government helped fund the ability for these laborers to take part in the culling efforts, but that violence was at times outsourced to this community instead of being done by the British. Additionally, the people being paid to kill these dogs were also the people that then became most exposed to the disease. But when you have a reward that is equivalent, if not higher, to a full day worth of wages, that risk diminishes. Reports from Kolkata at the time documented 12,000 dogs were killed annually. In 1813, legislation called Regulation 2 allowed for the culling of ownerless dogs in Bombay. However, the response in 1832 from the Parsi community in India began to cause riots and protests against this British policy for culling because they considered the dog to be a sacred being. But the British did not stop. In 1879, stray dogs in Madras, or modern-day Chennai, were being killed under the orders of the Commissioner of Police to combat what they called hydrophobia, the fear of water, and what they used to call rabies back then, one of rabies' worst symptoms. The mass cullings of stray and rabbit dogs appear to have been one of the most widely implemented measures for rabies control in colonial era India. Various methods of culling were used, all of which were very barbaric, including shooting, drowning, and poisoning. Why was culling used so frequently? Culling was both cheap and fast, which is what made it appealing to the British first. Once these methods proved to work in Britain and led to dog-free streets, the same model was exported to India without considering the vastly different conditions present in India that would make this model fail. However, as dogs were removed from territories as a result of the culling, new dogs would take up their vacant spaces, but this ultimately led to increased dog fights, aggression, and biting. As a result, the method meant to prevent dog bites failed, and the problem persisted. Two hundred years of killing dogs, and yet rabies was still killing people. The solution, it turned out, would come out of a laboratory in France, and we have Louis Pasteur to thank. Pasteur was a French biologist and chemist, known to be the father of microbiology. We all know him from his work on pasteurization, heating liquids to kill bacteria. However, he was also the reason we have the rabies vaccine today. In 1885, a young boy by the name of Joseph Meister was bitten 14 times by a rabid dog, but he became the first person to be successfully treated. How was that possible? Alongside his colleagues, Pasteur used dried nerve tissue from infected rabbits to essentially produce a weakened version of rabies. And there, the first dose of this new vaccine was given to Meister, and over the next 10 days, he received 12 additional doses to induce a stronger immune response. Meister survived. Word spread fast, and patients from all around the world came to France to receive the vaccine. This prompted the creation of a dedicated vaccination center called Institute Pasture. Across British India, rabies was becoming more widespread, but treating bite victims was an immense burden on the colonial government of India. But this is also what drove what historians like to call pasturism in India. This was the time in Indian history where India adopted pasture's germ theory and his findings about rabies. The British pushed to establish research institutions across the subcontinent to help combat rabies. And so the Kasauli Pasture Institute opened in 1900 treating rabies patients. The modern rabies vaccine, as we know it today, came from David Sempley, a British officer who worked at Kausali. His version of the vaccine used sheep brain tissue instead of rabid spinal cord because it was able to be shipped across the country without losing its effectiveness. This was revolutionary. The Sempley vaccine was the most widely used rabies vaccine across the world. A vaccine invented in India for Indian needs ended up protecting people on nearly every continent. Like the Kasauli Institute, the British government established a network of pasture institutes across the country, the main ones being Kasauli and Kunur, which was built in 1907. Smaller laboratories were also built, which were critical for adopting pasteurism to the way rabies science was being conducted. However, the challenge in colonial India was that once rabies no longer posed a threat to the British, it declined on their list of public health priorities towards the end of colonial rule in the 1940s. Rather than trying to devise widespread public health initiatives for the general Indian population, British research into rabies became more focused on laboratory breakthroughs for vaccine production. Once independence was reached in 1947, the newly formed Indian government inherited a fractured health system that focused on individual treatment for rabies as opposed to preventative population level management, something that has yet to be reversed in India today. So now, we have a virus that has been killing people for thousands of years, we have a vaccine that has existed for over a hundred, we have a country that has built institutions dedicated to fighting against the disease. But then we also watch those institutions lose priority over the situation. And don't forget that we have 62 million dogs on the street. My uncle is a veterinarian in Tamil Nadu, India, and I asked him if he has seen cases of rabies or has heard of any of these stories.

SPEAKER_02 16:05

Yeah. She was given only the treatment for the wound itself. They did it because they thought that the animal looked normal, so they just treated the wound itself. Later she developed rabies and died.

SPEAKER_00 16:33

The animal looked normal. The incubation period of rabies means that the infected dog can look and behave completely normal, and by the time symptoms appear, it's just too late. Like this, there have been many recorded cases of the disease taking its toll across India, both urban and rural. And yet, we shouldn't be too quick to judge the dog as being the sole cause for this crisis. As we saw in the history of domestication, this animal did not arrive on the streets of India uninvited. Their arrival was shaped by the history of human decisions. So let's talk about the system that failed both dogs, humans, and the disease. One part of this system lies in waste management. How does waste management relate to dogs? Well, the inadequate waste collection in India has led to significant increases in waste on the street and in open dump areas. And this waste serves as one source of food for stray dogs. Could the stray dog population be sustained through excess waste on the street? My uncle said yes.

SPEAKER_02 17:41

Yeah, dumping of garbage on the roads or the streets is the best source for food for stray dogs. And that contributes to the problem. Either they reproduce and as well as they become the source of rabies.

SPEAKER_00 18:00

Is the solution rooted in removing excess garbage that can act as their food source?

SPEAKER_02 18:06

Yes. The government can attempt to curb the problem with people's garbage feeding sea dogs. The population will go down. But this is also a public issue, not just a governmental one, uh, in order to remove the garbage.

SPEAKER_00 18:22

Additionally, what increases aggression in dogs is the competition they face for scarce resources like food, particularly near overflowing garbage dumps, where the idea of food becomes uncertain. The problem in this situation is the waste management failure, not the dog. But what is the common culture about dogs in India to the folk who live amongst them? Is garbage the only thing sustaining them? It is important to take a look at some of the relationships dogs and humans have shared in this area that may help to shift this narrative. A survey was conducted from 2010 and onwards, and participants were asked to list what their perceived problems were in relation to street dogs. Usually people complained about barking or chasing, sometimes fear of the dog itself, or even the idea that dogs were not meant to fit in with a developed country. Only 15% of people said anything related to rabies being a problem, which was lower than the percent of people who said dogs were ugly. But then, there are people who have built rather positive relationships with these dogs, mainly through feeding them. 64% of those interviewed said that they had offered food or water to street dogs at one point, and 19% admitted they took regular care of a certain dog. So now we know, casual feeding of dogs with scraps of food is very common, and while there is a population who despises these dogs entirely, their counterparts play a role in helping sustain the dog population. It is hard to say whether the sustenance of the dog population is strictly a governmental issue, via waste collection, or because of the general population through casual feeding. But now we have a picture of how stray dogs in India are not simply the product of negligence, but are sustained by a combination of a broken waste system, casual feedings, and a cultural coexistence. If we can understand all of this, what does India actually try to do about it in modern history? There are two main interventions used in India, and understanding both of them is the key to understanding why people are still dying. In 2001, the government of India replaced Culling with something called the Animal Birth Control Program, or ABC.

SPEAKER_02 20:36

The ABC or the Animal Birth Control Program is a big program that has the support of the government in both urban and rural areas. The program involves stray dogs being captured, neutered, and relocated in the places where they are captured. This is the best and number one way of controlling the population because when you restrict the population growth, it automatically reduces the risks of ribies.

SPEAKER_00 21:05

These dogs even get marked on the ear so that anyone who sees this animal will know the dog has already been through the program. The logic actually seems to work well. A sterilized dog will continue to hold onto its territory, cannot reproduce, won't attract new dogs into the area, and if enough dogs go through this process, they will develop what is known as herd immunity, where the virus cannot spread because there aren't enough hosts able to sustain it. It has been a quarter of a century since ABC was implemented. So, why does the rabies crisis still persist in India? The WHO has stated this clearly. The total percentage of vaccinated dogs up to 82%, just 10 years after it became mandated by law to vaccinate stray dogs. Japan wasn't alone. Mass vaccination programs beginning in the 1920s and 1930s were largely responsible for the eradication of rabies in Canada, Western Europe, and the United States. India knows what the solution to this problem is, and other countries have proved the solution works. So why hasn't it worked here? In a country with a population of free roaming dogs as big as India, there is also inadequate awareness on this issue and a lack of sufficient data surrounding dog population dynamics, which makes it difficult to sustain these intervention programs. A report released in April of 2026 revealed that there are only 76 accredited sterilization centers that operate throughout the entire country. A number that cannot keep up with the multiplying dog population nor help to reach 70% vaccination coverage. When I first heard about the ABC program, I thought it could be the answer to a long-lived issue. Sterilize, vaccinate, and return. It seems humane and scientifically sound. And what is important is that similar models have worked in certain countries. But then you look at the numbers: 62 million dogs and 76 sterilization centers, and no reliable verification to confirm whether or not the program really works. So then, an understanding forms that this is not a scientific failure or really a policy failure either, but rather a priorities failure. The solution seems to exist, but it's as if India is unable to fund its sustainability. When a dog bites someone, vaccinated or not, there's an intervention available for the person too. We return back to Pasteur and his contributions to modern-day post-exposure prophylaxis, or PEP. The vaccine today is referred to as the anti-rabies vaccine, or ARV. Currently, the primary strategy employed on the national level to prevent rabies deaths is to administer the ARV to any individuals with suspected rabies exposure. If administered properly, post-exposure prophylaxis can be close to 100% effective. Nearly 100% effective. And yet, people are still dying. Why? The issue is the timely and affordable delivery of PEP to prevent clinical rabies. But in a large country like India, achieving this is very difficult. Most people in rural areas don't get it, cannot afford it, or simply just don't know it exists. The cost and availability of the ARV, especially in endemic areas, remains a serious barrier, and vaccine shortages are not uncommon. Colonial health systems were not devised to deliver maximum health benefits to the greatest number of people. Rather, they were created to deliver health services to the British ruling class first. The legacies of this health system continue to impact vaccine availability and delivery to humans and dogs. The effectiveness of curbing this problem relies on intertwining both interventions for the dogs and the humans. They only work as a part of the same coordinated system, and that coordination is what India has failed to deliver. The problem initially seems to be one about awareness. Maybe people just didn't know about the vaccine or know what actions to take after being bitten. But it seems the problem of awareness might also exist alongside a longer list of problems. We can try to understand what it takes for the vaccination to be effective for both dogs and humans. You need the dog to be caught in a country with 62 million dogs and 76 sterilization centers. You need to make sure that the dog gets vaccinated and sterilized in a country where most states have allocated a limited budget to do so. You need a person who gets bitten to know that they need treatment in communities where almost half of the population doesn't know rabies is fatal. You need to make sure that the person has access to a clinic over the course of several months for vaccine administration, a possibility that decreases for those in rural areas where the nearest facility may be hours away. Each one of these steps is a place where the system can fail. So when people ask why the vaccine has not been able to solve this problem, it seems as though the vaccine is the last link of an already broken chain. July 28th, 2025. Two Supreme Court judges in New Delhi responded to a news report in the Times of India titled City Hounded by Strays, Kids Pay Price. A paper that reported the tragic death of a six-year-old girl succumbing to rabies. The bench expressed their shock at this case, noting that this has incited extreme fear in the public, especially in parents. This means that the court opened this case themselves. No petition, no lawyer filing a complaint, just two judges saw and read this newspaper about a child's death and decided they had seen enough. What followed was one of the most chaotic legal stories in Indian history. On August 11th, 2025, the bench ordered Delhi authorities to clear areas with dogs within eight weeks, re-home them to shelters, and ensure they were not released back to the streets. The order cited children, the elderly, and the visually impaired to be the most at risk from these free-roaming dogs. And that was the reason why this order should be in place. It was an urgent call and immediately led to controversy. On one side, you had animal activist groups who believed this was inhumane and unsound, and they took to the streets of Mumbai protesting. Some veterinarians were also hesitant due to the fact that it would be a difficult task to fit millions of dogs into shelters. And so, 11 days later, the court reversed itself. On August 22nd, a three-judge bench modified the order. Dogs that are picked up must be sterilized, dewormed, vaccinated, and returned to the same area from which they were picked up. Only dogs that were infected with rabies or exhibited aggressive behavior were held back. They also mandated designated feeding spaces and helplines to report violations, which is an effort to help regulate human behavior around strays and protect animal welfare. On November 7th, the court issued another order, which defined institutional areas, hospitals, schools, railway stations, sport complexes, basically anywhere where large numbers of people can gather together, and it was ordered that stray dogs to be removed and relocated to shelters. Not returned, removed. So in the span of three months, the highest court in India had issued three separate, slightly contradicting orders on stray dogs, and each one revealed something about the impossibility of this problem, and potentially answered why there isn't a concrete solution currently in play. Some argued that the issue had a clear answer, and they did agree on one solution: capture, sterilize, vaccinate, and release. And yet, here we are in court still arguing about it.

SPEAKER_02 29:47

And this is being practiced now.

SPEAKER_00 29:50

But will it continue to work?

SPEAKER_02 29:53

I'll say yes, it's a good practice.

SPEAKER_00 29:57

We started this podcast with two children, a nine-year-old in Mumbai and a six-year-old from Delhi. Both unfortunately died from rabies. We have talked about the intensely long journey of dogs living alongside humans on the Indian subcontinent, the colonial government that shaped the human-dog relationship, built institutions to fight off the rabies virus, and then deprioritize them on their way out, the creation of the vaccine, policy frameworks, and even when the Supreme Court had to step in. And now I want to circle back to the question I asked in the beginning. Why does the rabies crisis in India still persist today? I don't know if this question is a clear answer, and I think anyone who tries to tell you there is an answer on either side may not fully understand how intertwined the health of the two, that is, humans and dogs, truly are. What I keep circling back to is that the impasse in rabies research and practice in India comes from a failure to understand the full complexity of the human-dog relationship. You cannot separate the dog from the dump it feeds from. You cannot separate the dump from the community that has failed to collect the garbage. You cannot separate the community from the state government that cannot fund its collection. You cannot separate the state government from a social culture that has allowed the issue of rabies-related deaths to persist. The dog almost exists at the end of a long list of human failures. Those who believe that we should remove the dog are not wrong themselves, because it is true that people and children are dying every day. They are not wrong that 3.7 million dog bites a year should be treated as an emergency. They are not wrong that parents should be able to send their children into public spaces without the fear they may get bitten. On the other hand, the people who believe it is a governance problem and not a dog problem are not wrong either. The ABC program works where it is implemented, and the vaccine we have in place is very effective.

SPEAKER_02 31:52

Dogs are naturally companions to humans that can be kept as a fact provided you follow the instructions of the doctor. Protect your family by vaccinating your people. So if there is a large population of two dogs, the problem should be solved by larger human population. The auto is not inherently caused by the dog, but rather the lack of human environment to eradicate the problem. This helps to reduce the incidence of rival.

SPEAKER_00 32:28

We started with the dog and ended up here, at the intersection of history, governance, public health, and an incredibly long relationship between humans and dogs. Maybe the question was never meant to just be about dogs, but rather about what happens when society inherits a problem that doesn't have a fully worked out solution. The dog on the street is still here today, and so is the virus. And in the space in between the two, the answer to this problem is still being worked on.