Doggone morality
KILL a butterfly, and you are a villain; kill a cockroach, and you are considered a hero, Friedrich Nietzsche reportedly said. This rightly points out that morality has its own aesthetics. Pour some emotion into the mix, and we have quite a viscous concoction.
An editorial in Dawn recently pointed out the dire circumstances of rising rabies cases across the country, affecting rural and urban areas alike. Louis Pasteur invented the vaccine for rabies, caused mainly by rabid dog bites, in 1885. He was testing the vaccine for dogs when a nine-year-old boy from Alsace was mauled by a rabid dog. His mother begged Pasteur to save her dying son by administering the vaccine that had, till then, only been tested on dogs and rabbits. Dr Jacques Grancher, a clinician, played no small part in convincing the lab scientist to do the mother’s bidding. For 10 days, the boy received 12 doses of the vaccine daily. The boy survived.
During this summer’s floods, a young volunteer, Hamid Ismail, was bitten by a dog while delivering relief aid. Leave aside what that brave man went through, one does not wish anyone to see the videos from his hospital bed. Even his survival, thanks to a very dedicated team of doctors at a military hospital, was turned into a controversy by some animal rights activists, who challenged the facts of the case and claimed that Hamid suffered from tetanus rather than rabies. They strongly oppose any measure to control stray dogs other than vaccination and sterilisation.
If plausible, sure, why not? No one has anything against dogs. However, in a country where most basic health units don’t even have paracetamol, even as a placebo for the suffering humanity that relies on public health infrastructure, do people really believe that resources will be made available to catch, vaccinate, and neuter dogs? Of course, we can have academic debates about where the fat should be cut and where expenses need to be curtailed; better still, let us rue corruption and demand that all the resources saved from these menaces be diverted towards health services, especially anti-rabies vaccine production, distribution, and the humane solution to the stray dog problem. We have not straightened our priorities, even to teach our children and provide our people with three square meals so far; now that we are hearing ‘security first’, it takes a particular kind of innocence to expect a change in national priorities and resultant expenditure.
Even in jungles, culling is used to maintain natural biodiversity.
Even in jungles, or at least in national reserves, culling is used to maintain natural biodiversity when a particular species begins to encroach on others’ share or runs amok in its habitat. An animal as majestic and noble as an elephant has been culled throughout Africa when its population became unmanageable. Let us take an example from our own neck of the woods. Trees are living, and some believe they are sentient beings, and we cannot love and cherish them enough. It’s a shame that, owing to poor planning, the purpose-built federal capital, Islamabad, was planted with paper mulberry, not an indigenous tree, in the early 1960s. Over time, they grew into majestic beings; however, they caused severe pollen allergies and respiratory problems. Thousands of beautiful trees had to be cut; we miss and mourn them, but it had to be done.
Every year, the dengue season arrives without fail; a bite from an infected Aedes mosquito causes fever, and repeated bouts can be fatal. Governments run dengue prevention campaigns, spraying entire neighbourhoods and sprinkling insecticide into puddles and ponds of stagnant water, killing maybe hundreds of millions of larvae and mosquitoes. How come the rights brigades don’t feel any pang of guilt for this mass murder? Do they not consider mosquitoes living beings, or is it because they don’t possess ‘consciousness’, a sense of self? If it is the latter, then dog-lovers are applying the food chain and aesthetic hierarchy rather than espousing a moral cause. We cannot dissuade them; all we request is that they consider children walking long distances between villages to get to school, pedestrians navigating unlit alleys in urban centres, and volunteers like Hamid, their equals on the food chain.
Dogs were domesticated and then turned into pets; this is where the aesthetic of morality and emotion comes into play. How many animal rights advocates are vegans? The mutton karahi and chicken tikka they devour to sustain their placard-bearing labour used to be living beings; they have not yet graduated to the status of pets. Ghalib said, “As the dog-bitten fears water; I am terrified of the mirror, for I am man-bitten.” Rabid dogs and ideals remain our doggone problem.
The writer is a poet. His latest publication is a collection of satire essays titled Rindana.
Published in Dawn, December 26th, 2025