{"id":8218,"date":"2012-07-18T02:13:25","date_gmt":"2012-07-18T06:13:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/?p=8218"},"modified":"2012-07-18T22:18:28","modified_gmt":"2012-07-19T02:18:28","slug":"disappearing-dogs-of-colombo-city","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/?p=8218","title":{"rendered":"Disappearing Dogs of Colombo City"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Photo by: Sarath Kumara<\/p><\/div>\n

by Thulasi Muttulingam<\/strong><\/p>\n

F<\/strong>or the fourth time within the last month, animal rights activists staged a protest demanding to know where the dogs they are feeding are disappearing.<\/p>\n

Ever since 2010, canines have been disappearing off the roads of Colombo according to the activists. They have been campaigning since then to get the dogs back.
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\n\u201cThese animals were not a threat. They were well looked after and cared for. They had been sterilized, vaccinated and had people feeding them regularly. Yet they have been abducted. All we want to know is where they are and what is happening to them,\u201d says Sharmini Ratnayake, one of the activist protestors.<\/p>\n

A number of animal welfare organizations such as the Sri Lanka Animal Protection Association, Animal Welfare Trust, Adopt a Dog and the Pooch Foundation took part in the protest on Saturday.<\/p>\n

\u201cAre they drowned or shot?\u201d, \u201cDevelop the City in a Humane Way!\u201d, \u201cThey have a right to live too\u201d were some of the messages seen on the placards carried by the protestors. According to them, whenever they tried to investigate, all leads finally pointed to the Colombo Beautification Program. And so they have been trying without success to engage with the Defence Secretary, Gothabaya Rajapaksa on the issue.<\/p>\n

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photos: Sarath Kumara<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cWe have tried calling as well as writing letters to him several times but he has thus far ignored all our overtures. We\u2019ll continue to protest until we some light,\u201d says Visakha Tillekeratne, of the Animal Welfare Trust.<\/p>\n

The activists, numbering around 50, grouped themselves by the Lipton Circle in Colombo 07, last Saturday carrying placards demanding to know the fate of the dogs. Passers-by, both vehicles and pedestrians gave curious glances, indulgent smiles or just went on past on their busy schedules without noticing. Some policemen stopped by to see what was happening, asked that certain specific placards be removed but otherwise didn\u2019t stop the protests.<\/p>\n

The protestors, who say that all their efforts to talk to the authorities have gone nowhere, are determined to carry though with the protests until they know what is happening to the dogs. The first dogs to disappear were from Galle Face in 2010. The activist \/ animal lover who fed them saw them being bundled into a van and has been campaigning for their release ever since.<\/p>\n

Since then, activists claim, many other dogs have been abducted off the streets of Colombo in various suburbs, often in broad daylight.<\/p>\n

Since the dogs that are being abducted are sterilized, vaccinated and well looked after, the activists say there is no rationale for it.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese secretive abductions are not acceptable on any basis. It is not acceptable on the basis of the \u2018No Kill\u2019 policy officially adopted by the government, not acceptable on the basis of ecology and certainly not acceptable on the basis of compassion and humanity,\u201d says Tillekeratne.<\/p>\n

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Culling of dogs was stopped by President Mahinda Rajapaksa in 2006. In early 2012, when Minister of Health, Maithripala Sirisena announced that the \u2018No Kill\u2019 policy didn\u2019t seem to be working, there was a huge public outcry on what was perceived to be a backtracking on the government on its position. The minister was hasty to clarify that he had been misquoted and that the government was still committed to the \u2018No Kill\u2019 policy.<\/p>\n

Figures the Minister quoted however said that 2000 people are bitten in Sri Lanka every day and so the chances of rabies are extremely high.<\/p>\n

Sharmini Ratnayake however refutes this. \u201cMost of the bites are owner related; i.e. it is house pets who bite the owners for various reasons. Stray dogs are dependent on the community and are usually very mild mannered. Unless they are really pushed into it or attacked, they hardly ever get aggressive. That\u2019s something everyone knows.\u201d<\/p>\n

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A vet who asked not to be named reiterated Sharmini\u2019s statement: \u201cMost of these dogs are well looked after, sterilized and vaccinated. They were not really \u2018stray\u2019 dogs but community dogs in that sense. Most dog bite cases are owner related. That too has a story as dogs are not generally in the habit of biting their owners. When we did some research, we found that the affected pet owners did some really stupid things like putting their hands into the dogs\u2019 mouths or pulling out thorns from their paws by hand.<\/p>\n

There just might be one or two cases of aggressive stray dogs being a neighbourhood threat but I personally haven\u2019t come across them. Most of these dogs are non aggressive and not a threat to anybody.\u201d<\/p>\n

And so, the saga of the disappearing dogs of Colombo continues. The activists say they are determined to see it through, until they get an answer from the authorities on what exactly is happening. Colombo\u2019s beauty to them is marred by the lack of dogs.<\/p>\n

The Ceylon Today was unable to reach anyone at the Ministry of Defence, under whose purview the Colombo Beautification Program lies, to give a comment Courtesy: Ceylon Today<\/em><\/p>\n

Tweet<\/a><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Thulasi Muttulingam For the fourth time within the last month, animal rights activists staged a protest demanding to know where the dogs they are feeding are disappearing. Ever since 2010, canines have been disappearing off the roads of Colombo according to the activists. They have been campaigning since then to get the dogs back.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[12],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8218"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8218"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8218\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8226,"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8218\/revisions\/8226"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8218"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8218"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8218"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}