Stray Dogs Save Abandoned Baby in India

April 24, 2008

NEW DELHI – Known as a country with a rampant population of stray dogs, India’s notorious problem ended up saving the day, and a precious life.

On Sunday, local villagers followed the yelps and howls of a pack of stray dogs to a fruit orchard, where a newborn was discovered, District Magistrate Asangba Chuba Ao told The Associated Press.

The baby girl was left abandoned under mud and leaves in the northeastern region of India but was found by the dogs, which barked until help arrived, Chuba Ao said on Tuesday.

Now the child is in the care of a farm couple in the village of Narhan, in the Nepal-bordering state of Bihar. With no information available to authorities about the possible birth parents, officials could not explain the reason for the apparent abandonment.

However, the cultural preference is for boys, which often leads to sex-selective abortions and the abandonment of female babies by mothers who are under severe pressure to produce male children.

While, this little girl’s story is not fully known, she is fortunate to have survived the ordeal and been found by the society’s other cast-offs, feral dogs.

Stray canines have a long history in India and until January 1994 were subject to mass killings, as a means to control the population and reduce the number of human deaths due to rabies.

After studies by the World Health Organizations and the Animal Welfare Board of India revealed that the killings did not solve the problem, the killing program was replaced by mass sterilizations.

The new program is now carried out by non-government organizations with the collaborative effort of local municipalities.

Differing from western developed countries, India has two elements which allow dogs to survive as ferals – exposed garbage and urban slums.

This kind of an environment gives dogs the ability to be scavengers with an ample food source of garbage. This vastly contrasts with the situation that stray dogs might face in a country like the U.S., where the dogs originated as pets and then are abandoned. These dogs might live like strays but they can not survive or breed on the streets, where food sources are scarce and being picked up by Animal Control is inevitable.

How did the stray dog issue begin? According to the Welfare of Stray Dogs, more than 14,000 years ago, when India became home to the Pariah dog -- one of the world’s oldest canine breeds, which also inhabits much of Asia and North Africa.

Historically, and currently, rural families keep at least one Pariah Dog, but as development turned villages into urban hubs, the rural family pet became a stray.

For decades the population boomed, but as sterilization reigns in the age-old issue, a new wave of dogs is turning up on streets. This new stray population stems from irresponsible pet owners abandoning their dogs.

It is not known if the stray dogs that saved the baby were the aboriginal Pariah Dogs, or mix-breed strays.

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Robin Wallace, Pet Pulse, the Welfare of Stray Dogs and The Associated Press contributed to this article.