SrinagarIn yet another horrifying incident underscoring the need to check the growing canine population in Kashmir, a six-year-old girl was mauled to death by stray dogs in a Sopore locality on Monday evening.
The girl was attacked in the Muslim Mohalla situated on the river Pohru in Wadoora Payeen while she was returning home from a madrasa, reports said,
Identified as Hadiya Mushtaq, daughter of Mushtaq Ahmad Dar, the victim was rushed to the sub-district hospital in Sopore by her family, where doctors declared her as brought dead.
The station house officer (SHO) at Bomai, Abdul Majeed, said that the girl had died on the spot, and that the police had registered a case. Soon after the incidents, people staged protest and demanded culling of the canines.
According to government figures, the Baramulla district, of which Sopore is a major town, has witnessed 288 reported dog-bite cases in 2017.
In a grim coincidence, stray dog attacks figured in legislature proceedings on Monday, with the government putting the number of such cases in Srinagar at 33238 over the past six years.
Replying to a calling attention motion by PDP MLC Zafar Iqbal Manhas, the government said that 33238 dog bite cases were registered at an anti-rabies clinic at the SMHS hospital in Srinagar.
It said that 7,000 cases were registered in 2012-13, 6,041 in 2013-14, 4,917 in 2014-15, 5,100 in 2015-16 and 5,120 in 2016-17. Last year, 5060 cases were registered
The proliferation of dogs is linked to abundant availability of energy-rich food, particularly offal and other non-vegetarian refuse.
There have been incidents of stray dogs chasing, attacking and biting school children, aged persons, pedestrians, morning walkers and two-wheeler riders.
The government said that Srinagar city had seen a decrease in the dog population to around 49,000 dogs as per the 2011census conducted by an independent agency, The Humane Society International, which had adopted the Lincoln index.
A previous survey by the Srinagar Municipal Corporation had the number of canines at around 90,000.
The government said that the September 2014 floods had also caused a decrease of around 5,000 dogs in Srinagar.
SMC has been working on multiple strategies to control the dog menace within the city, mainly focusing on minimizing the availability of energy rich food and garbage on the roads and animal birth control programme, the government said.
It is an established fact that the multiplication rate of dogs is quite high, but their survival rate mainly depends on the availability of food, he said.
In 2013, a government-constituted expert committee had advocated curtailing food waste availability in the city to control the canine population.
If food is available in abundance, the multiplication and survival rate will be higher, if the availability of food waste is curtailed, this will have a bearing on the life span and proliferation rate of stray dogs, the government said.
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