Repeat of Bagh Amberpet horror: 4-yr-old boy mauled to death by stray dogs in Kazipet

KAZIPET: Even before the gruesome incident of a four-year-old boy being mauled to death by street dogs in Bagh Amberpet of Hyderabad was erased from the public memory, another such horrific incident occurred in Kazipet of Hanmakonda district.

An eight-year-old boy, Chotu, was attacked by street dogs in the local Railwayuarters area during the early hours of Friday when his parents Sunitha and Malkan left him alone briefly to answer nature’s call. The family, belonging to Uttar Pradesh, reached the railway station on Thursday night to travel to Ajmer. They slept in a park near the station waiting for the train.

The boy was alone when the mongrels attacked him. It is said that just as he tried to escape from the dogs, his shirt got stuck to a branch of a tree thus falling easy prey to the stray beasts. The dogs attacked and bit him wildly, killing him instantly. His parents rushed him to the MGM Hospital where he was declared ‘brought dead’.

Government chief whip Vinay Bhaskar and Mayor Gundu Sudha Rani visited the hospital and consoled the boy’s parents. However, residents of the Railway quarters alleged that the municipal authorities took no action even after two such attacks took place in the vicinity in which a railway employee and a young girl were attacked by the same pack of stray dogs.

While there were several such incidents of dog attacks across the state, this is the second incident in the Warangal area in the last one month where a child succumbed to dog bites.

At least four children have lost their lives while many others have been injured in stray dog attacks across the state in the last four months. A five-year-old died of rabies after he was bitten by a rabid dog in Khammam.

The government has announced several measures to eradicate the dog menace after the Bagh Amberpet incident where a four-year-old boy Pradeep, son of a watchman, was brutally attacked by a pack of street dogs. The gut-wrenching visuals of the CCTV footage sent shockwaves and evoked widespread public outcry.

Following the incident Union Minister G Kishan Reddy met and consoled the family of the child. He held the GHMC and the state government responsible for the death of the boy. Filmmaker Ramgopal Verma (RGV), through his tweets, blamed the GHMC and Mayor Gadwal Vijaya Laxmi, alleging inaction.

He tweeted “Please round up all the 5 lakh dogs into a dog home and make the mayor Gadwal Vijaya stay in their midst." In another tweet, he said "And we citizens would like to know where and how the 18 cr allotted by the government was spent to tackle the dog menace and I want to sit on a tv debate with dog lover Gadwalvijaya and her team, and if she doesn’t agree, the people will come to know who the real dogs are."

The officials however feel straight-jacketed to take drastic steps as they were bound to act as per the directions of the Supreme Court and rules set by the Animal Welfare Board of India.

Dogs can neither be shifted nor abandoned in a far-off place. Even the Artificial Birth Control and Anti Rabies programme (ABC-AR) stipulated that the dogs that were caught from an area must be returned within 200 meters of that same location after sterilisation or anti-rabies shot given to them.