The meeting was initiated by Sam Sattar, an animal lover who’s been at the forefront of creating awareness about humane stray dog management.
The Karachi University has been poisoning and shooting dogs on its campus for decades.
PAWS representatives and others at the meeting urged the VC to consider adopting the university stray dogs as part of their natural environment and working toward neutering and vaccinating them.
“This would create a stable and safe stray population that would also prevent other outside dogs from moving on campus,” they argued. “It would also over time reduce the campus dog population as they wouldn’t be able to breed and produce more puppies.”
“The remaining dogs would be rabies free and pose no threat to the students and staff on campus.”
Dr. Qaiser said he agreed culling dogs was barbaric and welcomed other solutions. He hoped someone would step in and remove the dogs for them.
When it was explained to him how it was necessary to maintain a familiar population to prevent new dogs from coming in he relented and agreed to a proposal for a project and subsequent meeting to discuss it.
The World Health Organisation and doctors of the Pakistan chapter of Rabies in Asia recommend mass vaccination and spay/neuter campaigns as an effective and humane method to deal with rabies and stray dog populations in developing countries.
Such campaigns are already in practice in neighbouring countries like India, Sri Lanka, Nepal and Bangladesh.
It is hoped that necessary resources can be pooled in time to create a pilot project on the campus of Karachi University that is more befitting an educational institution of higher learning than routine culling of dogs.
