The clash of paradigms: The free-ranging street dog and the struggle for urban modernity

“ In nearly all parts of the world traces of an indigenous dog family are found, the only exceptions being the West Indian Islands, Madagascar, the eastern islands of the Malayan Archipelago, New Zealand, and the Polynesian Islands, where there is no sign that any dog, wolf, or fox has existed as a true aboriginal animal. In the ancient Oriental lands, and generally among the early Mongolians, the dog remained savage and neglected for centuries, prowling in packs, gaunt and wolf-like, as it prowls to-day through the streets and under the walls of every Eastern city. ”

“ Even in the Orient, where dogs have been granted immunity from other labor on the condition that they organized an effective street-cleaning department, they have been false to their trust and have evaded their contracts quite as if they were Tammany braves, like whom they pass their days in slumber and their nights in settling private disputes, while the city remains uncleaned. ”

“ The size of the breed should be relative to the accommodation available. To have a St. Bernard or a Great Dane galumphing about a small house is an inconvenience, and sporting dogs which require constant exercise and freedom are not suited to the confined life of a Bloomsbury flat. Nor are the long-haired breeds at their best draggling round in the wet, muddy streets of a city. For town life the clean-legged Terrier, the Bulldog, the Pug, and the Schipperke are to be preferred. Bitches are cleaner in the house and more tractable than dogs. ”

“ A man who has once caught a deer must not again have the hair of his head touched by a razor, and thus the Pārdhis may be recognised by their long and unkempt locks. A breach of this rule is punished with a fine of fifteen rupees, but it is not observed everywhere. A woman must never step across the rope or peg of a tent, nor upon the place where the blood of a deer has flowed on to the ground. During her monthly period of impurity a woman must not cross a river nor sit in a boat. A Pārdhi will never kill or sell a dog and they will not hunt wild dogs even if money is offered to them. ”

“ Every year, after the crops are harvested, they worship the rivers or streams in the village. A snake, a jackal, a hare and a dog wagging its ears are unlucky objects to see when starting on a journey, and also a dust devil blowing along in front. They do not kill wild dogs, because they say that tigers avoid the forests where these reside, and some of them hold that a tiger on meeting a wild dog climbs a tree to get out of his way. ”

“ The country round Agra and Delhi is their home, and the shrine of the tutelary goddess of some of the Agarwālas in the Central Provinces is near Delhi. The memory of the Nāga princess who was their ancestor is still, Sir H. Risley states, held in honour by the Agarwālas, and they say, ‘Our mother’s house is of the race of the snake.’1 No Agarwāla, whether Hindu or Jain, will kill or molest a snake, and the Vaishnava Agarwālas of Delhi paint pictures of snakes on either side of the outside doors of their houses, and make offerings of fruit and flowers before them. ”

“ WHEREAS; the City of Charleston has long been concerned with the health of its citizens; and
WHEREAS; lung diseases, known collectively as chronic obstructive pulmonary diseases, are the fourth leading cause of death in the United States; and
WHEREAS; respiratory therapists care is recognized as one of the most vital and progressive segments of the healthcare delivery system in the City of Charleston ”

“ A large fire is a windfall to the whole tribe.
Cincinnati the previous year, as the Post said, had substituted a paid fire department for the volunteer system. It was disgraceful for New York to depend on a violent, licentious body which was educating the city’s youth in turbulence and rowdiness and was often worse than useless when the firebell sounded. The insurance companies at this time kept eighty men, at a cost of $30,000, to guard against fires, and many merchants and families employed private watchmen. But relief did not come for more than a decade. ”

“ These people might live in the same building, eat from the same venders, visit the same Rec halls, even work at the Center. But under the carefully staggered schedules in the structure of the Organization's work pattern, schedules which enabled 32,000,000 people in this particular City No. 9 to live in a circumscribed area without trampling one another underfoot, the chances were good that none of these people had ever crossed Hendley's path before. ”

“ The population of your city, increasing with such prodigious rapidity; your sultry summers, and the corrupt atmosphere generated in hot and crowded streets, make it a cause of regret that in laying out New York, no preparation was made, while it was yet practicable, for a range of parks and public gardens along the central part of the island or elsewhere, to remain perpetually for the refreshment and recreation of the citizens during the torrid heats of the warm season. ”

“ Each street is the recognized dwelling-place of an irregular pack, and dogs—and in some cases even men—from other quarters are warned off or attacked if they cross the boundary.
It is said also that the wild dogs of India will drive off a tiger if he strays into the neighborhood of their chosen habitat. Even tame wolves will, without being taught, threaten a stranger if he comes near their master's house, but will take no notice of the coming and going of the regular inmates. ”

“ You stand in the street and make your purchases, looking well to your bargains, for the old fellow, with all his dignity, will not hesitate to cheat a "dog of a Christian" if he can. From every dark alley as we walked along several dogs would rush out, bark violently, and after following us a little way slink back to their own quarter again. ”

“ Each alley and street of the city has its pack of dogs, and none venture on the domain of their neighbors. During the day they sleep, lying about the streets so stupid that they will hardly move; in fact, horses and donkeys step over them, and pedestrians wisely let them alone. After dark they prowl about, and are the only scavengers of the city, all garbage being thrown into the streets. The dogs of Pera have experienced, I suppose, the civilizing effects of constant contact with Europeans, as they are not at all as fierce as those of Stamboul. ”

“ After this he should go and bathe in the Ganges, but if he is too poor the Nerbudda may be substituted for it with the permission of the caste committee. The penalty for killing a cat is almost as severe, but to slay a dog involves no sin. If a man who has committed a murder escapes conviction but his guilt is known to the caste, it is absolutely incumbent on him to go and bathe in the Ganges and be purified there, having his head and face shaved. After this he may be readmitted to caste intercourse. The caste observe some curious rules or taboos: they never drink the milk of a black cow ”

“ I call attention to lost opportunities with something like reluctance, and only in the wish to emphasize the fact that our crippled or destroyed cities do invariably rise again, and that if the next American city to sustain disaster shall but have this simple lesson learned in advance, it may thereby register a new high mark in municipal intelligence and a new record among the rebuilt cities, by making more sweet than any other city ever made them, the uses of adversity.
The fire of 1904 found Baltimore a town of narrow highways, old buildings, bad pavements, and open gutter drains. ”

“ Almost every city presents a paradox, if you will but [ 203] find it. The St. Louis paradox is that she is a fashionable city without style. But that is not, in reality, the paradox, it seems. It only means that being an old, aristocratic city, with a wealthy and cosmopolitan population, and an extraordinarily cultivated social life, St. Louis yet lacks municipal distinction. It is a dowdy city. It needs to be taken by the hand and led around to some municipal-improvement tailor, some civic haberdasher, who will dress it like the gentleman it really is. ”

“ The native city of Delhi is like most other cities in India, a huddle of mean houses in mean streets, diversified with splendid mosques. The Chandni Chauk (“silver street”) , the principal street of Delhi, which was once supposed to be the richest street in the world, has fallen from its high estate, though it is still a broad and imposing avenue with a double row of trees running down the centre. During the course of its history it was four times sacked, by Nadir Shah, Timur, Ahmad Shah and the Mahrattas, and its roadway has many times run with blood. ”

“ You see, Kansas City is a very young and very great center of business. It is still engrossed in making money, but, being so exceptionally sturdy, it has found [ 297] time, outside of business hours, as it were, to create its parks and boulevards—much as some young business man comes home after a hard day's work and cuts the grass in his front yard, and waters it, and even plants a little garden for his wife and children and himself. ”

“ In this country it was, at the time it originated, unique; and though other cities (such as Denver and San Francisco) are now at work on similar improvements, the Cleveland plan remains, I believe, the most imposing and the most complete of its kind.
When an American city has needed some new public building it has been the custom, in the past, for the politicians to settle on a site, and cause plans to be drawn (by their cousins) , and cause those plans to be executed (by their brothers-in-law) . This may have been "practical politics," but it has hardly resulted in practical city improvement. ”

“ Monkeys have become lawless citizens of Delhi, and will no doubt greatly welcome the [178] enlarged scope for mischief which the new city will open out to them. They travel in troops over the flat roofs, and are very bold and mischievous, and great thieves. But monkeys must be studied in their wild freedom in the woods to appreciate them. When seen leaping from tree to tree with refreshing elasticity, or from rock to rock in the open country, their spirit of fun and mischief having full scope, the sight is a delightful one. ”

“ The movement of the progressive societies has been uniform in one respect. Through all its course it has been distinguished by the gradual dissolution of family dependency and the growth of individual obligation in its place. The Individual is steadily substituted for the Family, as the unit of which civil laws take account. The advance has been accomplished at varying rates of celerity, and there are societies not absolutely stationary in which the collapse of the ancient organisation can only be perceived by careful study of the phenomena they present. ”

“ It is just here that archaic law renders us one of the greatest of its services and fills up a gap which otherwise could only have been bridged by conjecture. It is full, in all its provinces, of the clearest indications that society in primitive times was not what it is assumed to be at present, a collection of individuals. In fact, and in the view of the men who composed it, it was an aggregation of families. The contrast may be most forcibly expressed by saying that the unit of an ancient society was the Family, of a modern society the Individual. ”

“ The tokens of an extreme antiquity are discoverable in almost every single feature of the Indian Village Communities. We have so many independent reasons for suspecting that the infancy of law is distinguished by the prevalence of co-ownership, by the intermixture of personal with proprietary rights, and by the confusion of public with private duties, that we should be justified in deducing many important conclusions from our observation of these proprietary brotherhoods, even if no similarly compounded societies could be detected in any other part of the world. ”

“ Ancient jurisprudence, if a perhaps deceptive comparison may be employed, may be likened to International Law, filling nothing, as it were, excepting the interstices between the great groups which are the atoms of society. In a community so situated, the legislation of assemblies and the jurisdiction of Courts reaches only to the heads of families, and to every other individual the rule of conduct is the law of his home, of which his Parent is the legislator. ”

“ The bias indeed of most persons trained in political economy is to consider the general truth on which their science reposes as entitled to become universal, and, when they apply it as an art, their efforts are ordinarily directed to enlarging the province of Contract and to curtailing that of Imperative Law, except so far as law is necessary to enforce the performance of Contracts. The impulse given by thinkers who are under the influence of these ideas is beginning to be very strongly felt in the Western world. ”

“ BYELAWS made under Section 68 of the Town Police Clauses Act, 1847, and Section 171 of the Public Health Act, 1875, by the Lord Mayor Aldermen and Citizens of Oxford, acting by the Council, with respect to HACKNEY CARRIAGES in the City of Oxford.
INTERPRETATION 1. Throughout these byelaws "the Council" means the Lord Mayor, Aldermen and Citizens of Oxford, acting by the Council. and "the district" means the City of Oxford. ”

“ Among things which never had an owner are wild animals, fishes, wild fowl, jewels disinterred for the first time, and lands newly discovered or never before cultivated. Among things which have not an owner are moveables which have been abandoned, lands which have been deserted, and (an anomalous but most formidable item) the property of an enemy. ”

“ There has been material civilisation, but, instead of the civilisation expanding the law, the law has limited the civilisation. The study of races in their primitive condition affords us some clue to the point at which the development of certain societies has stopped. We can see that Brahminical India has not passed beyond a stage which occurs in the history of all the families of mankind, the stage at which a rule of law is not yet discriminated from a rule of religion. ”

“ Old Xanthippus, too, (amongst many others who buried the dogs they had bred up,) entombed his which swam after his galley to Salamis, when the people fled from Athens, on the top of a cliff, which they call the dog's tomb to this day. Nor are we to use living creatures like old shoes or dishes, and throw them away when they are worn out or broken with service; but if it were for nothing else, but by way of study and practice in humanity, a man ought always to prehabituate himself in these things to be of a kind and sweet disposition. ”