The Life of a Street Dog
There are 60 million stray dogs in India. 400,000 of them are roaming around Hyderabad and a fair few of them are outside our apartment - 2 am to 4 am being their preferred meeting time for a very vocal chat and a run around. On any given day 100 bite cases are reported in the city. Thankfully we have never had a bad encounter with a dog - we are sensible, walk by without engaging, but our heart goes out to them. Often limping, three-legged, torn-eared, always mangy and scruffy and pitifully thin with rib cages evident they make us so wish we could take them home and give them a good dinner. There are no dedicated government shelters or rehabilitation centres but there are many NGO’s in the city who work to sterilise the strays to bring the population down. 20 per cent remain unneutered. A report in the national press said that these alpha dogs were a wily bunch who hid in the bushes and scrubland near the river that winds its way through the city and evade all attempts at capture. They go on to produce big litters who join the ranks cruising the streets. Lots of citizens love the dogs and volunteer in privately run shelters and many feed scraps and food to the strays. We have joined their ranks and buy bags of dog treats at the grocery store. It is a feature of emerging wealth here that families have dogs as pets instead of just for guarding property. Having funds to buy dog food on top of your budget for family food is a luxury. We know people with fluff ball pomeranians, labradors, huskies with their eerily beautiful ice blue eyes, alsatians, labradoodles…. But it is the distinctive pale cream, scraggy, skinny Hyderabadi street dog that still steals our heart. Sleeping with one eye open in the middle of the pavement, hustling across four lanes of traffic, scrounging through the garbage or hightailing it down an alleyway to meet a fellow scavenger or avoid the daily dogcatcher roundup.
Scripture says beware of dogs. But it also says that the little dogs searching for the crumbs under the table are seen and known by our God. These beseeching words from the Canaanite woman in Matthew 15 v 27 brought us, the gentiles, into the presence of Jesus and we want to remain there with him. We want her great faith. ‘Please Lord, for even the dogs eat the scraps which fall from the table’.