82/ 100 Purple Jacket Dog
Is it always a good idea to give a street dog a coat?
When we first visited India back in 2018 it was very unusual to see a street dog with a jacket. The goats were given clothes to keep them nice and plump through the colder winter months but, having skimmed through my photographs from that first trip, only one or two dogs wore an extra layer. This year, however, dogs everywhere were well wrapped up and dressing street dogs seems to have become a popular pursuit. I don’t think this was always a good thing though.
In the more northern cities of Varanasi, Agra and New Delhi the winter nights can be quite chilly with night temperatures dipping to 5℃ to 10℃ and, in fairness, it must be a bit cold for the dogs at night. In the past we have found them huddled around a campfire, dozing in the porches of buildings or snuggled into a cardboard box somewhere. I can definitely see why a dog jacket might be a nice thing to have at certain times of the year but, then again, they have lived without them for countless years.
Most noticeable to me was the huge increase in coat-wearing dogs in the city of Varanasi, perhaps because there is a particularly large tourist population there who all want to do a good deed. In fact, many of the coats bore the same camouflage design and looked to be quite well made. I asked a few folk if they knew where these jackets had come from and, whether it is true or not, most people said that a Russian lady had come and dressed dozens of dogs in their winter coats. The problem is that whoever put the jackets on the dogs in the first place wasn’t around to make sure that the dogs were comfortable in them later.
Many of the jackets had become very dirty and torn. Some of them hung loosely because the straps had broken and others had become too tight. We came upon a very unfortunate chap who was furiously licking an awful wound at the top of one of his front legs. He had somehow managed to get that leg up and out of the neck hole which resulted in it being extremely tight around the armpit. The indie dog was in front of a small mobile phone shop so I mentioned to the men working there that the dog needed help but they either weren’t interested or they were afraid to interfere and stood, watching us from the shadows.
We couldn’t ignore the poor pup so I carefully untied all of the straps and, as gently as I could, pulled the jacket off and out of a very deep and infected wound caused by nothing more than continual friction from the ill-fitting coat. The dog was screaming in pain but the wonderful creature never once tried to bite me. As the dog went off to, quite literally, lick its wounds, I noticed we had attracted a fair bit of unwanted attention so I ditched the jacket and left the dog with at least a fighting chance. On a few occasions we have noticed that there are some people who don’t really like the dogs and don’t appear to understand their basic needs either. These same folk also don’t want other people—like us—interacting with them and they become visibly agitated. I’d have liked to have helped more but we both felt that our time in that particular street was coming to an end.
The dog in the photograph above—nobody knew whether it had a name—was living outside a lovely stationery shop in the Khan Market, Delhi. Its armpits were fine. It had a water bowl, a large kennel made from a cardboard box with a bed inside and, of course, the bright purple fleece. That all seems great at first glance; however it was also quite hot that day with daytime temperatures around 25℃. Standing there in the full sun, even in the winter, it was pretty scorching and the local folk were actually standing in the shade of their shops.
The dog was panting away and I asked the shop owner whether he had ever considered taking the jacket off in the daytime and putting it back on at night. He told me that he did look after the dog, but that he didn’t put the jacket on and therefore it wasn’t his place to take it off. Whoever put the coat on would take it off. I suggested that the person who put it on might not even be in India now and his response was a shrug of the shoulders and a return to watching reels on Instagram.
This apparent lack of common sense, whether stemming from a fear of getting involved or from indifference to the dog’s welfare, is very frustrating for a practically minded person like myself.
