Today I was woken up to the howling of a poor puppy who the neighbour had decided to adopt by picking it off the street. The animal was probably days old and the mother of the puppy having spent a day walking around the wall as its pup howled trying to find its mother from a cage he was unfamiliar had decided to lie on the road helpless, with no custodial rights over its pup (now that would unimaginable, a dog to have rights?) while the whole neighbourhood listened to the crying which went over night, and then to the morning as well.

Many assumed that the poor animal was locked up and the wonderful neighbour had gone out for a walk. But on giving them a call I find that they were in the house, and was quite courteous enough to rudely hang up the phone on me. I try to dig out my law books to find out where the animal rights would be protected in this country, though not very hopeful having read a bit on it last night and realised that it most likely would not be much of help. And as usual like many other things in this land the direction is clear: treating animals humanely seems to be something that needs to be added to the country’s list of “to-dos” though we claim we are a very compassionate land where we treat everyone with dignity (everyone not every being of course, which excludes animals).

Me being the not going to courts lawyer, I call up a friend who works for the Attorney General’s and ask him what might be the best move in this situation to ensure that the poor animal be released from this suffering. He advises me to file a complaint on nuisance. His theory being: the police would have to come and check on it, and if the animal is being a nuisance with its howling, then the howling would be stopped. Though my expectation was not to prove that the dog was a nuisance, (rather that my neighbours were inhuman) I realise that most of us in our legal education had skipped studying the section on animal protection in detail.

I started writing an article with the law and its efficiency on not addressing this issue, but then on reading a bit more realise that it is not necessarily the nonexistence of the law that prevents animals from being protected, but the oblivion of its implementation. To do justice to the cause, I think I will be writing a bit on animals and their rights in the coming days, that too with a bit more legal analysis than this article would have carried had I just typed it out from my few hours of reading last night.

My next few days (be it in this land, in transit or some other land) will be about getting a few people together who might be interested in this topic, if you are reading this and are a person who had done a bit of thinking on animal rights protection and legal reform, do drop a comment. Your opinions are most welcome, (constructive ones of course).

PS. I am not a tree hugger, nor an animal hugger. But I do believe that animals are not in the world to carry humans, and be tormented for insecurities and psychopathic disorders that humans possess (this would bring me to write on another issue which is on mental health which would be for a different blog post I think).