JOIN USDespite the negative publicity, stray dogs are fiercely loyal.
Facts and tales from the animal kingdom always fascinate me. Last week while channel surfing I learnt that every zebra has different stripes and in the wild the Savannah grass camouflages them from their predators. All animals mourn when their young ones are killed. A herd of wild buffalos were crossing a river when a crocodile attacked a calf and killed it; the mother was inconsolable and wailed. These are all jungle tales and as long as there is no encroachment into animal territory, man is safe. But with urbanisation we keep pushing the boundaries, and what was once their living space has become ours.
Monkey tales are legion – perhaps because they are so close to humans in the evolutionary ladder. A friend of mine was aghast to find a huge monkey atop her fridge with an apple in hand. With presence of mind she threw a blanket over it, held it by the neck and threw it out of the balcony! My mother saw two monkeys sitting on her dining table and carefully peeling bananas; she entered the kitchen and saw another one there. She quietly came to the drawing room and opened the front door and then in her no-nonsense school-teacher voice she said ‘please leave the room.’ To her surprise they came out in single file walking on their hind legs – the biggest first, followed by medium and small!
Every afternoon at lunch time a monkey visits a family and it has specific likes and dislikes. He comes near the dining room window and makes a noise to get their attention! During the mango season if he’s given a banana he scowls; he likes boiled and salted peanuts, if you give it to him raw it will be thrown right back!
Stray dogs attacking children and morning walkers are in the news all the time. Despite the negative publicity stray dogs are territorial animals and fiercely loyal to the road they live in. Years ago a litter of six pups were born under our car and when I tried to hose them out the mother became my arch-enemy.
But my son began feeding the frisky pups and gradually I was accepted. In Kolar a street dog was very attached to a young girl and followed her everywhere. Before her wedding they took it in a van and abandoned it far away, but it promptly came back on her wedding day.
Now on our road attention has shifted to fat cats that run on our ledges and rooftops chasing bandicoots. In a corner of our compound a cat left her newborn kittens – a cat lover whisked away two kittens and a tomcat killed another one. Every time I opened the door, the mother cat would look at me questioningly with eyes that said ‘where are my babies?’ We behave as if we own the world, but it’s their world too!