Category: Environmental Science

Should we let Delhi go to the dogs?

An architect from Jamia Millia Islamia has figured out how to minimize conflict between species

Justin Podur
March 3, 2013
First Published on Viewpoint Online (Pakistan)

India’s urban dogs are an unfamiliar sight to a visitor. Their behavior is mysterious. Why do we hear them barking at night, and not during the day? What kinds of territorial disputes are going on between them? Why are some so friendly to humans, while others shy away? Which dogs are responsible for aggression against humans, and why? Do India’s cities have a ‘dog problem’?

Every North American city has an infrastructure dedicated to taking dogs off of the street. There is 1 dog for every two humans in North America, compared to 1 dog for every 50 humans in India. Virtually all of the North American dogs are pets. To a North American, this – bringing the dogs into homes as pets – could be the solution to any conflict that might arise between dogs and humans in the city.

But to Rishi Dev, architect and instructor at Jamia Millia Islamia, this is the nightmare scenario to be avoided at all costs. This is not because Rishi Dev dislikes dogs – on the contrary, he is a true dog lover who has spent the last 13 years studying the animals. But the basis of his philosophy is a scientific understanding of dogs as a species adapted to the outdoors, a species that has a special relationship with humans, and a species that “values freedom more than food.”

“Dogs are a keystone species,” Rishi Dev says. “They keep rats away, they exclude other animals. By bringing them into homes as pets and off of the street, you are creating a vacuum.”

That vacuum is filled first by other dogs – feral dogs from outside the city. This was exactly what occurred after the famous Bangalore cull of 2007, in which 3000 dogs were killed in 3 months. Feral dogs came into the city, bringing rabies, which had not been a problem in the urban dog population. Dog haters didn’t benefit, as feral dogs filled the void. “The ones who did benefit were the pharmaceutical companies, who sold more rabies vaccines than ever, after the cull.” If dogs continue to be excluded, other animals take over – cats, and rats, neither of whom have the kind of special affinity for humans that dogs have.

Rishi Dev, a champion of the Indian-evolved street dog, is quick to remind people not only that these dogs are perfectly adapted to the Indian environment, but also that 79% of bites in Delhi are caused primarily by pet dogs, not street dogs. The street dog is misunderstood in other ways as well. The population of street dogs is not limited by food, but by high mortality, so feeding dogs will not cause an increase in their population. Dogs are hardier than humans, can travel much farther on foot, and can survive much longer with very little food and water. And their hardiness makes them more friendly to humans, not less. “Compare dogs and monkeys,” he says. “Urban monkeys are more aggressive than dogs – partly because they are less hardy species.” On the other hand, he writes in his thesis, their hardiness means that “if pushed to extinction, they are capable of taking measures that would prove absolutely fatal to humans.”

His analysis is based on a multi-year study conducted as part of his master’s degree in ekistics from Jamia Millia Islamia. Based on years of field observation and questionnaires, Rishi Dev classified Delhi into zones where the relationship between humans and dogs was desirable, sensitive, or undesirable. In the undesirable zones, humans and dogs met one another with hostility and aggression. In sensitive zones, dogs lacked the ability to freely enter or exit.

Most interesting was the desirable zone, which included areas like around Metro stations or certain residential areas with specific spatial patterns. Here, there were fewer dogs for each human than in other zones, and the relationship works because humans take advantage of the special behaviors of dogs. As social animals, dogs form packs with defined hierarchies. But – and this is unique to dogs – the minute the dogs are fed by humans, the pack is dissolved and the dogs become loyal to the humans that feed them. Feeding is not to be confused with throwing scraps, however. “Feeding creates a relationship with the human feeding the dog, whereas if you throw waste at the dog, they become protective of the food, including from you.”

By feeding them, dogs in the desirable zones were adopted, classified in Rishi’s study as ‘community dogs’, and regularly fed by the humans. These community dogs, with their territorial instincts, drive off dogs from outside the community. “Dogs respect territory, so that two dogs can drive off twenty.” Weaker dogs, dogs without relationships to humans, also defer to the healthier, better fed dogs that are associated with the community, which also enables a small number of community dogs to exclude larger numbers of feral dogs from the outside.

The adoption of community dogs is the first step to a stable, desirable relationship between people and dogs. After the dogs are domesticated, they can be spayed or neutered to control the population. Without domestication, Rishi Dev argues, animal birth control efforts are futile – some dogs will always escape, and dogs are fecund enough to repopulate the streets unless tremendous effort and expense is put into constantly killing them – which, if done, would bring its own problems, including, as mentioned above, species that have no such special liking for humans. Following a similar logic, the Delhi High Court gave an order that dogs could be fed at defined feeding stations in the city, in order to create these desirable zones.

“This approach,” Rishi says, “is in accord with our customs. In Hinduism, in Islam, we keep dogs, but not in the home. But really it’s a completely scientific approach. I am not looking at this as a dog lover, I am just looking at how we can minimize the conflict.”

Rishi’s vision is of a city of community dogs, with a stable, low population, relating to humans as friends, without fear. The biggest threat to this vision is, surprisingly, the pet industry itself. 67% of the population increase of dogs is from abandoned pets, breeds poorly adapted to urban India that have introduced new health problems and more aggression into the street dog population. The pet industry sees a growing market in urban India: “Communities are breaking down, families are breaking down, people in the cities are alienated, and they turn to pets for companionship. But this eventually leads to greater conflict between the species.”

Rishi started on this path through an intraspecies encounter of his own. “In 1994 I got bitten by a dog. This dog used to sit outside my house every day, and one day I accidentally stepped on him. He bit me on the leg, and I was enraged. I called the municipal corporation. They came and caught him, and I remember the way he looked at me, as if he was asking what did I do? So I asked them to let him go. I thought, maybe it wasn’t his fault. The most amazing thing was, after about five days, he came back. He had some apprehension towards me, but he came back, and I realized, despite the danger to him, he would keep coming. He was kind of confident that he could coexist with me. He was cautious, but confident. And I started to think about how this was all about space, and not about the animal, and that we could design spaces to have a better relationship.”

Justin Podur is an Associate Professor of Environmental Studies at York University in Toronto, Canada. This winter, he is a Visiting Professor at Jamia Millia Islamia in Delhi.

Some environmental books

I gave a couple of environmental talks in Texas over the weekend, which have since been published on the web. One on sustainability in general. The other on climate change, science and politics.

To prepare for them and before and since, I read a bunch of environmental books, that I’ll discuss below.

Derrick Jensen, ‘Endgame’. Recommend this very highly. I came away with great respect for Jensen. It was just refreshing. I don’t agree with everything – I suppose I hope that he’s wrong about civilization being inherently unsustainable more than knowing that he is – but I agree with most, and I just found him to be honest, ethical, and serious throughout.

Chris Turner, ‘Geography of Hope’. Interesting reporting on alternative technologies in different parts of the world. Chris is a little breathless, I think too enthusiastic (though he acknowledges that his enthusiasm is strategic, because what’s needed is some breathless enthusiasm) and his framework is ‘Natural Capitalism’ by Hawken and Lovins (which I’ll also mention below), a framework I disagree with for various reasons. He also does an unfair and unhelpful swipe at Cuba, suggesting that their organic urban agriculture miracle occurred because it’s a dictatorship (as opposed to because their social process enabled them to accomplish things that capitalist societies cannot). But I like his style and I can recommend the book.

Paul Hawken and Amory & Hunter Lovins, ‘Natural Capitalism’. The idea here is that thinking only of financial and manufacturing capital and not of social and natural capital is a mistake. ‘Natural capitalism’ would value natural capital as capital and treat it that way, not as income to be spent. Interesting technology again. But my several problems are as follows. First, if the entire infrastructure created for the automobile is unsustainable, and I think it is, then even vastly more efficient cars are still an error, compared to more collective solutions such as rail and changes to urban form. Second, trying to put monetary value on what are called ‘ecosystem services’ invites tradeoffs for things that cannot be traded off. Jensen actually makes this point well – bringing something into the money economy almost certainly guarantees its doom. The authors of ‘Natural Capitalism’ don’t do too much such valuation, but the framework invites such exercises. Third, the pun of ‘natural capitalism’ implies there’s something natural about capitalism, and capitalism usually implies not just markets, but private ownership of the means of production and hierarchical class society. I can’t accept such things as natural.

David Suzuki and Holly Dressel, ‘Good News for a Change’. Good green technology stuff again.

James Howard Kunstler, ‘The Long Emergency’. Interesting work about how America’s suburban and industrial infrastructure depends on oil, how oil will run out before too long, and all the problems that will result. Kunstler says repeatedly that he isn’t prescribing, but predicting the future. But I disagree with this attitude towards the future. The one thing about the future that we like is that it is at least partly up for decision. Kunstler would probably answer that it is part of delusional fantasies to think we can decide on the future, which is true of some parts of the future but not of others. Kunstler also combines what I think is interesting technological and economic analysis with very conventional and I think off-base geopolitical and domestic political analysis. He doesn’t understand the motivations or the politics or the history of the people the US is fighting and killing in massive numbers in West Asia, nor very important elements of immigration in the US, nor very important racial and economic problems in the US. His analysis of these matters seems to rely on stereotypes, and I’d hoped for better from a contrarian. It’s almost enough to make me not want to recommend the book – but several parts of several chapters (especially chapters 1, 2, and 7) should be read regardless of the weaknesses of the other chapters. I’m prepared to elaborate on this, because separating where he’s right from where he’s wrong is, I think, important and worthwhile.

McDonough and Braungart, ‘Cradle to Cradle’. I really enjoyed this. The idea is that we redesign our industrial system to have no waste. Everything is designed to be re-used or re-incorporated into other products, indefinitely. If they are right and what they say can be done, then perhaps civilization isn’t inherently unsustainable. They are pretty agnostic about what kind of social system would accompany this technological revolution (they don’t seem to endorse capitalism, natural or otherwise, for example) but I really like their technology and their approach to it. Several of the others I’ve read (Jensen and Kunstler, for example) would probably say that ‘Cradle to Cradle’ can’t work.

I think there are others but I can’t remember them. There are also several more on my list that I’ll be reading too.

Another round of climate denial

Two blogs ago I was expressing incredulity that the Dominion would provide a forum for climate denial in the form of Denis Rancourt, who has a good reputation as an activist but whose essays on the climate are preposterous. According to Rancourt’s blog, Rancourt has recently inspired sociologist and activist David Noble to tackle the climate issue in an essay that basically calls George Monbiot a dupe for his deference to politicized science. I find this all rather depressing. Rancourt and Noble’s anti-science arguments seem to me to leave people without any standard for evaluating arguments. I like science because the idea of science is that there is much about the world that can be understood, and that anyone can figure out how something works, it is a matter of time and effort. If it’s all politicized, then perhaps we can just cherry pick those scientific (or pseudoscientific) arguments that suit us and leave the rest. Certainly that is what Rancourt’s essay does, and that is also what Alexander Cockburn’s recent piece on the topic does – indeed, it relies on the same claims. Cockburn’s piece, like Rancourt’s, didn’t pass peer review at any (politicized) scientific journal, but it did get past the editors of ZNet, where I work. I did not think it should have, but I only saw it after the fact. In any case we asked George Monbiot to reply, which he did very effectively. So did some climate scientists, at the excellent site realclimate.org . It’s a bit of an embarrassment that long-discredited arguments are being trotted out by really respected leftists. I suppose it’s because it was Gore, rather than someone with a more decent record, who raised the profile of the issue. But this is one aspect of left behaviour I don’t agree with. It’s as if because the dems or the establishment say something, it’s automatically false. But I guess that’s a corollary of there being no factual matters and everything being political – no need to evaluate claims, if they’re coming from people with bad politics…

Climate change denial, in thin leftist wrapping paper

I just read (briefly) an interview with Denis Rancourt, a professor at the University of Ottawa who claims climate change is not happening and that talk of climate change serves oil companies. My quick reaction is that this is like Michael Deibert on Haiti or Irshad Manji on Israel/Palestine and terror – reactionary politics wrapped up in some thin progressive language to either dupe or confuse leftists who would otherwise be the most solid advocates of progress (or decent survival). It will take more looking into his work to know the details, but I find his explanation for lay people unconvincing:

“I argue that there is no reliable evidence that the global average Earth surface temperature has increased in recent decades. I argue this by making a critique of how such trends are extracted, inferred and extrapolated from incomplete and artifact-laden data. I explain melting glaciers and receding permafrost as more probably arising from radiative mechanisms, linked to particulate pollution, land use/cover changes, and solar variations, rather than global warming. And I argue that atmospheric CO2 does not control climate, but is at best a witness of global changes. These arguments are technical but I have tried to present them as simply and clearly as possible in the article.

Radiative mechanisms, land/use cover changes, and solar variations – rather than global warming? And that the ice isn’t melting because of increases in temperature? Science advances through counterintuitive results, but that doesn’t make counterintuitive results true.

“More importantly, I argue that the real threat (the most destructive force on the planet) is power-driven financiers and profit-driven corporations and their cartels backed by military might and that you cannot control a monster by asking it not to shit as much. I argue that non-democratic control of the economy and institutionalized exploitation of the Third World (and all workers) must be confronted directly if we are to install sanity.”

This is a nonsequitur. It gets into political strategy, and what he says here is partly obvious and partly dubious (since no one serious is really saying what he is arguing against), but in any case has nothing to do with climate change or his claims about why the ice sheets are melting or that the average temperature has not increased.

Monbiot’s book, Heat, opens with four questions:

1. Does the atmosphere contain carbon dioxide?
2. Does atmospheric carbon dioxide raise the average global temperature?
3. Will this influence be enhanced by the addition of more carbon dioxide?
4. Have human activities led to a net emission of carbon dioxide?

To get the answers they have liked to these questions, the denial industry has had to pay PR people to falsify scientific claims to set progress back a decade. Now someone like Rancourt comes along and answers them negatively, dismissing climate scientists as “political” and “consensus-driven” but from the left, instead of from the right. I suppose the timing was ripe for something like this, but I truly hope that people do not get fooled.