Gboyega Alaka attempts a critical look at the recent incident of dog attack on a four-year-old, paying specific attention to the inherent dangers of stray dogs on the loose, fatality of rabies infection, legal rights of citizens in the face of future challenges and more.
It’s not unlikely that there is a dog in your neighbourhood. Put more succinctly, it’s not unlikely that there is a stray dog on your street or somewhere next door, foraging ‘harmlessly’ for pieces of bones, shreds of flesh, or just about anything your refuse can offer.
Once in a while, there is actually a fine breed Rottweiler, Pug, English Mastiff, Boxer, Labrador retriever or German Shepherd next flat or somewhere behind the gate of that posh house on your street, purportedly being kept as a pet or for the purpose of security.
What is, however, unlikely is whether people, who are voluntarily or involuntarily forced to live with these dogs, ever stop to worry or even recognise the danger inherent in these animals. True, dogs have been severally described as man’s best friend, but the truth is they also have a tendency to become man’s worst enemies – depending on which side of its temper you find yourself.
For those who stop to think, do they ask questions? And if they do, do they go further by taking steps to forestall the possible danger? The unfortunate incident of four-year-old Omonigho Abraham, now undergoing treatment at the Lagos State University Teaching Hospital, readily comes to mind here.
His parents, Abraham and Helen Odia, recognised the danger posed by Jacky, the new dog brought into the compound by their landlord, Stanley Wisely, but did little more than a whimpering complaint to their arrogant landlord until the disaster occurred. Perhaps if they had recognised their rights under the law and taken the right steps, maybe – just maybe – their son, Omonigho, would not have been a victim of that deadly attack that left him dangling on the cliff of life and within a short distance of death.
And maybe Omonigho would still have been enjoying his quiet anonymous life and his mother, who says she is tired of the sudden celebrity status the unfortunate incident has thrusted upon her, would still have been enjoying her quiet life, rather than answering monotonous questions from desperate journalists, “who just want to sell their papers.”
It would be recalled that two dogs, Jacky and Ghaddaffi , being bred in their compound on Adegboyega Street, Igando, had invaded the Odia’s flat and made a meal of little Omonigho’s scalp, with only a last minute intervention by his mother proving to be his saving grace. Mrs. Helen Odia had braved the odds to go into the flat, after stick-wielding neighbours and a team of policemen had been too terror-struck to go in and rescue her boy.
But if providence has been so compassionate with the Odia family, preserving their son’s life in spite of the deadly fangs of the hounds, and raising two state governors to stand by them and benignly tussle over their son’s medical expenses, some victims, and indeed families, have not been so lucky.
Fatai Jimoh, then a 12-year-old, who lived with his father in Ajegunle, wasn’t so lucky, as he received a deadly bite from a rabid street dog and eventually gave up the ghost a few months later. Fatai had gone about his normal childish business after being bitten by the street dog and given a mere anti-tetanus injection by the owner.
Unfortunately, Fatai was too young to understand the deadly implication of a dog bite and did not tell his father or any member of his extended family, who lived a few blocks away. Worse still, he swore his peers who witnessed the incident of the dog bite to secrecy, inadvertently digging his own grave. It thus happened that even when the symptoms of rabies manifested, and he displayed strange agitated behaviour and an almost violent rejection of water, generally struggling in the throes of death, nobody suspected a dog bite, let alone a rabid infection.
The ready explanation was suspected food poisoning, until one of his peers unwittingly dropped the bombshell days after he had passed on. And so it was that young, bubbly Fatai, well-loved in the community, died a totally preventable and avoidable death.
Many wondered why the owner of the dog, knowing fully well that his dog was not vaccinated, merely gave him a mere anti-tetanus and went away. Could it be that even he didn’t know? Or that he just wanted to fulfill minimal righteousness, avoid the expensive post-exposure treatment and vacate the scene?
Like little Omonigho, five-year-old Edna also experienced her moment of terror that would subsequently instill in her a strong phobia for dogs, when she was chased and dragged all around the compound by a co-tenant’s dog in their Ikotun area home.
Thankfully, she didn’t appear to have been bitten, nor was she chewed up. But Edna’s parents nevertheless took precaution and promptly took Edna for anti-rabies treatment.
According to her father, Mr. Benjamin, there was no way he could have taken the risk of not taking her to the hospital for that vital post exposure treatment, “because she was so bruised and covered with blood at the end of the incident that we didn’t know if the dog actually sank its teeth in her skin or not. Besides, we didn’t know for sure if the dog had been vaccinated, or if the vaccination was up to date.”
Moreover, he had seen someone die of rabies after a dog bite in the past, and the sheer horror of how helpless the victim died was something he would not wish for his worst enemy. Also, Benjamin had heard somewhere that the rabies virus can also be found in dogs’ nails.
Yet despite these evident danger and hazard inherent in the mere presence of dogs in our environment, several are on the loose, and will probably always remain. To make matters worse, children go out of their way to tease some of these dogs and sometimes make them react violently, while some other people walk dangerously close, oblivious of the animals and whether or not they could be temperamental.
Deji, an auto-mechanic in Olodi Apapa area of Lagos, reveals the prevalence of stray dogs that live perpetually on street rubbish in his area. If he were to do a headcount, Deji says he would count well over 20 of those dogs roaming the streets, hounding each other and most times engaging in wild street copulation.
He also wondered why there is never any attempt to clear the streets of these dogs, not even vaccinate them, since the government is aware of the dangerous virus they carry.
“From what I’ve read and heard, health workers in other countries usually arrest such dogs and get them off the streets, or in some cases vaccinate them from house to house. “And I wonder why they would not do that in Nigeria. I think you should let them know that such carrier dogs pose danger to everybody, including their own children.”
Stray Dogs: Comparable only to lunatic on the loose
According to Dr. Funmilayo Alao, a clinician and small animal practitioner, who runs Ized Veterinary by Governor’s Road Junction, Ikotun, Lagos and who incidentally is wife of the president, Lagos State chapter of the National Veterinary Medical Association, the potential danger of stray dogs is palpable.
She agrees with the general public opinion that likens a stray dog to a lunatic on the loose and that must be avoided like a plague. “Even as a Vet doctor,” she reveals, “I don’t play with a dog I don’t know. If I see a stray dog, I simply move away from its path. That is not cowardliness, it is called wisdom. The reason is that I don’t know if the owner has vaccinated the dog or not; why then should I expose myself?”
She declares that even the average dog keeper or breeder in Nigeria rarely takes the effort to vaccinate their dogs as and when due, thereby underlining the danger in those who have nobody to care for them. As a Vet doctor and from her privileged position as wife of the president of a state chapter of the Vet doctors’ association, Dr. Alao should know.
To make matters worse, Dr. Alao also discloses that she has met several dog-keeping Nigerians, most of whom are educated, who always counter that they cannot spend a whopping N3,000 on vaccinating a dog, rationalising rather foolishly that “How much do we ourselves spend on Paracetamol?”
But the Vet doctor says the danger of an unvaccinated dog is lethal and the danger of the rabies virus cannot be compared with the meagre N3,000 required to vaccinate a dog and keep it safe. “There is a very big danger in an unvaccinated dog bite. You can be infected with rabies and the implication is death, because it’s a viral infection. The only thing that can stop it is a timely intervention.”
Worse still, she says the most vulnerable demography to deaths from rabies are children, because when they are bitten by dogs, “they hardly ever tell their parents when they get bitten by dogs” because of fear of being scolded. In the process, they also lose that vital moment, when their parents could have taken them out for that vital intervention treatment.
According to Global Alliance for Rabies Control (GARC), a global body founded in the USA and largely behind the instituting of September 28 as World Rabies Day since 2007, and whose vision is a world free of human rabies, over 55,000 people die every year of rabies, 99% of them from the world’s poorest communities, where the people care least for vaccination or where the economic deprivation is so harsh that such exigencies can only rank at the lowest rung on their scale of preference.
In Nigeria, even though the dangers of rabies resulting from dog bites (canine rabies) is well known, with virtually all the major tribes having well-known local names for it such as: digbolugi in Yoruba, ciwon kare, (Hausa), ginnaji, (Fulani), ebua idat (Efik) and arankita (Igbo), control measures are still grossly underdeveloped, leading to its increasing spread and avoidable deaths.
GARC is, however, of the opinion that a little, deliberate effort the world over, by governments and individuals through awareness, empowerment, access to accurate knowledge about the disease, an understanding that teasing or provoking animals like dogs can be dangerous and (most importantly) timely access to adequate treatment in the event of exposure to the virus could go a long way in successfully ridding our world of this preventable disease.
Lion Dogs: From biting to eating
The big question many in Nigeria have been asking, however, is: What could make a dog ‘progress’ from mere biting to eating a human being alive?
According to Adeshina Samuel, a dog lover who has been keeping dogs for years and who says he diligently vaccinates and takes care of his dogs, “It could only have been hunger, as the natural dog reaction, even when you provoke it, is to growl, bark at you and bite. If you are fast enough to avoid the teeth, you get some vicious scratches, but not for it to now settle down to have you for lunch like we read in the case of poor Omonigho. So, for me, the owner must have been starving them. Except, of course, if the dogs have gone mad.”
Alao, however, posits that first and foremost, it is likely that the dog (Jacky) had never seen the boys in that flat and was therefore not familiar with them. Secondly, she says it is absolutely unwise to suddenly bring a fully mature dog that does not know anybody around into the house.
“I understand that the dog was recently brought into the house fully matured. This is another lesson that I always pass to my clients. Why bring a fully mature dog into the house? It’s just like when you go and buy a fairly used car. The truth is if the car was serving its owner well, he wouldn’t have had any reason to sell it. If you trace the history of that dog to where it was coming from, it is likely that it had become a nuisance in the neighbourhood. It is also possible that it was no longer respecting its owner and by the time a dog attacks its owner, that means it has become extremely dangerous.”
To kill or not to kill?
Curiously, the police allegedly called the complainant and father of the victim, asking what to do with the dogs, and threatening to return them to the owner if he did not give them any reply. Should this happen, the dogs will be returned to the same house where they’d wrecked so much havoc; something many consider unthinkable.
A large section of public opinion is of the view that the police should do away with them, since they have tasted blood and are very likely to want to travel the same route if let loose again. Alao also thinks the best option is to put the dogs to sleep. She recalls that they were told back in Vet school that “once a dog kills a human being, it must sleep that day.”
