69/ 100 Stray Dogs in India

Stray dogs. There are thousands in India, and you can’t avoid them. India certainly isn’t unique in this respect as we have seen huge numbers in South America and other Asian countries such as Thailand too but one thing that seemed to be a little different was the way the dogs looked.

In Argentina, for example, the packs of dogs roaming around the streets, and even coming to rest their sorrowful head on your knee inside a restaurant hopeful of a scrap of spare food, consisted of a wide variety of mongrels. The range of colours and sizes was about as all-encompassing as it could be. It wouldn’t be unusual to find a little pack with a fierce Chihuahua in the lead followed by a lurcher, a spaniel and some mongrels of varying sizes and colours. India, however, seemed different in that the dogs in each town were all almost identical with only the odd exception.

In the towns of Varanasi, Jaipur, Udaipur and Agra they were mostly medium sized and sandy coloured with good sized ears that must help them to cool off in the hot summer months. Down in Chennai they seemed predominantly a little darker and larger and when we visited the curious French speaking town of Pondicherry, even further south, most dogs we saw were black. I don’t know the exact reason for these localised breeds of dogs but I am going to hazard a guess because I enjoy pondering such things.

Nobody in India that we spoke to thought that keeping a dog as a pet was a good idea and, in fact, we saw only a couple of (rightly terrified) dogs being walked on a lead in the 8 weeks we spent there in total. However, in Argentina, as well as the feral dogs, there are loads of dog lovers keeping pedigree animals. So many, in fact, that they have famous dog walkers that you will see being dragged about the cities by 10 or more dogs on leads.

I think that those fancy South American city dogs escape to have a bit of fun from time to time and spread their genes around Buenos Aires whereas in India there simply isn’t that opportunity. I am guessing that the lineage of the local colonies of dogs in India goes back hundreds of years. There are so few opportunities to add new variety to the gene pool there that they have interbred extensively and possibly adapted to live in those environments. I wonder whether they have some adaptation that stops them getting run down by scooters? I know that our own dog Chip wouldn’t last a day there.