Compassion, Hunger and Animal Suffering: Scenes from Kerala, South India

ABSTRACT

Animal narratives have not been a major part of the coronavirus pandemic other than to frame animals as “epidemic villains” whose relations with humans are either zoonotic or pathological. In this context, this article considers stories of compassion from Kerala, where activists and ordinary people started feeding stray dogs and other street animals during the state instituted lockdowns. State sanction and media coverage of feeding these hungry animals allowed them to be instated as part of a multispecies community in the pandemic, allowing them for the first time, legitimized access to food and water. Compassion was prescribed and validated on the basis of perceiving suffering synergistically or as mutually experienced during the pandemic. However, a linear history of compassion cannot be constructed as Kerala has an antagonistic relationship with street dogs framing them as violent free-ranging dogs that carry diseases and attack people. This article draws on insights gleaned from multispecies ethnography to explore the hidden everyday lives of the animals during the pandemic. It raises questions about how people come to occupy relations of care in societies where animal suffering is not acknowledged and explores the possibilities opened by the way compassion was constructed as a practical and moral value during the pandemic.

KEYWORDS:

• Compassion
• synergic suffering
• stray dogs
• hunger
• pandem

Acknowledgments

I thank the activists who took time to talk to me despite feeding hundreds of dogs every night. Their labour of love, often single-handedly, alleviated hunger. Rukmini Nair, Bharati Puri, Anna Tsing and Anandi Gandhi read earlier versions of this article and gave great feedback. I am also grateful to Ankur Barua for his patience with my ideas as well as my drafts.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The use of the word “animal” instead of non-human is not theoretically unproblematic because it still homogenizes a lot of beings under that one category. But since the article is mostly about street dogs, I will “stay with the trouble” and use animal to refer to them (see Derrida & Wills, 2002; Fudge, 2004).

2. For an excellent analysis of this theme, see special issue of Antipode on “More-Than-Human and Deeply Human Perspectives on COVID-19”.

3. In 2015 and 2016, when street dogs were being killed brutally in many parts of Kerala, people commented on how Kerala’s self-image as a state with the highest literacy rate in India and scenic natural beauty with the state tourism tagline “God’s own Country” did not translate to any benevolence for dogs. In social media, this amended tagline was a pun on the state motto. At the same time, a Kerala legislator also used “Dog’s own country” to refer to how the “stray dog menace” has been uncontrolled in the state.

4. Two gruesome incidents particularly mobilized the public imagination. In August 2016, a 65-year-old woman was killed when she was attacked by a pack of stray dogs on a beach near the state capital, Thiruvananthapuram (Kerala reports over 8 lakh stray dog attacks in 5 years, 2021). In another similar horrific incident, in October 2016, a 90-year-old man who was sleeping in the veranda of his house was attacked by a pack of dogs and he passed away after succumbing to his injuries (The NewsMinute, 2016). Informal massacres of stray dogs by vigilante squads following are common and, in this instance, a “social worker” killed almost 90 dogs.

5. R.M. Kharb, the Chairman of the Animal Welfare at the time made the connection explicit: “When it comes to stray dogs, it has been observed that there is general lack of compassion in the state and it is on a rise” (Dey, 2016).

6. An American dry dog food brand popular in India.

7. Anuradha Ramanujan’s essay on the massacre of street dogs in Bangalore in India in 2007 maps the moral panic produced by the popular press which mirrored the socio-economic anxieties of a city with material prosperity but also rising population, unemployment and inequality (2015). Similarly, Molloy’s study of the “dangerous dogs” legislation in the United Kingdom shows how canine “risk” is constructed and how media reports have oscillated between welfare and cruelty, painting the canine as both a threat and a victim (2011).

8. It is sometimes even characterized as misplaced compassion that is contributing to an ecological crisis which negatively affects other species (Bhalla & Vanak, 2020).

9. The Animal Welfare Board of India, established in 1962 under Section 4 of The Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act, 1960 is the statutory advisory body of the Indian government to promote animal welfare and to protect animals from unnecessary suffering.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Fulbright Association; Culture and Animals Foundation.