Dogged pursuit: Corporation comes up with app to keep tab on stray dogs

CHENNAI: With the dog population in the city is up and with no enumeration in four years, Greater Chennai Corporation has decided to get an update. It has developed a mobile application to keep a tab on community dogs and scientifically bring down their numbers. The application will not just help the corporation to enumerate the number of dogs, but will also give officials an idea of their area-wise concentration, gender, age and reproductive ability.
“Every day we get more than 40 complaints on stray dogs. Despite the animal birth control programme, the dog population seems to be increasing by the year. So we decided to take it up scientifically and planned to come up with the application,” said veterinary officer Kamal Hussain.

Health department officials have completed a pilot project in three divisions in Sholinganallur, Teynampet and Royapuram. “Once we get administrative sanction, we will implement it in three other zones and later across the city in a few weeks,” said a senior official from the health department.

The application will have six categories: Sterilised male, unsterilised male, sterilised female, unsterilised female, lactating mothers and puppies. “We will have colour codes for these dogs and this will help us keep a tab on the population even after six months. All the puppies and lactating mothers will be our target for sterilization,” said an official.

In the earlier census, done manually with the help of NGOs, the civic body had pegged the number of dogs at 84,000. “Once the application is available and the census is carried out, we will have a clear picture on the number of dogs in each area. We will also know if these dogs were sterilized or not. Then we can carry out programmes in areas where unsterilized dog population is high. Also, the data on lactating mothers and puppies will help us more as they will be our target a few months later. To find out the reality at division level, we decided to come up with an application. The scope of error will not be more than 5%,” said Hussain.

As per the World Health Organisation, at any given time, nearly 70% of the total dog population should be spayed and neutered.

“Such enumeration is very important and it should be carried out once in six months after the animal birth control programme is implemented,” said Mini Vasudevan of Humane Animal Society.

Senior health department officials said once the census was carried out, they would conduct a mass sterilization programme. Dawn Williams, general manager, Blue Cross of India said it would cooperate with the corporation. “Our volunteers will work with officials and enumerate the dogs,” he said.