Stray dogs in Andhra's Vizag district bit 13 people on Monday. The incident which took place at Rolugunta saw the first attack at 7 am and subsequent attacks on people living in the area.
Deccan Chronicle reported:
The injured were first admitted to a local hospital and later at the Narsipatnam hospital. They were administered the anti-rabies vaccine and discharged. There have been complaints earlier of stray dogs attacking locals in and around Rolugunta, the young and the elderly being the main targets.
Andhra is no stranger to the dog menace as many areas, especially in Vizag district have failed to control the population of canines.
The Greater Visakhapatnam Municipal Corporation (GVMC) had earlier stated that it had taken up a mass sterilization drive.
However, The New Indian Express reported:
Sterilisation is not an ideal solution to control the alarming problem as a dog’s life span is 13-15 years. If the GVMC’s latest claim that 70,000 dogs had been sterilised and another 30,000 remain to be sterilised is true, then the stray dog problem in Vizag will continue for over a decade going by the current pace of sterilisation.
Other districts in the state are also no exception to this rule.
Breaking down the statistics in Guntur district, The Hindu reported:
A look at the data available with the Health Department reveals that the number of dog-bite cases received at the Government General Hospital (GGH) at Guntur stands at 1,714 in April, 1,335 in March, 1,454 in February, and 1,576 in January. Senior veterinary surgeons say that tackling such a serious issue needs a multi-pronged approach. The most effective is is to opt for Animal Birth Control (ABC) measures, which would effectively reduce the ferocious nature of dogs, but even this requires a lot of coordination between municipalities and the Animal Husbandry Department.