India: Dogs, Donkeys & Dogmas

Dogs, donkeys and dogmas belong to very different semantic world, though connected in sound. But they illuminate a certain pattern of social behaviour and cultural psychology. 

Dog: The Companion 

Dog is a domesticated companion of human beings. Dog stands for intimacy, loyalty, the unruly life that refuses to be neat. He has been with us for the last 20 to 40 thousand years, and his ancestor gray wolf joined our hunter gatherer ancestor bands in the late Pleistocene. The domestication process began well before the development of agriculture. It began as a form of self domestication. He might have been attracted by the bonfire of our ancestor bands celebrating a huge catch. He must have been less aggressive and submissive. And human bands' campsites offered enough opportunities for scavenging food waste such as carcas and discarded bones. The relationship was symbiotic with the gray wolf's haunting howl that alerted his master of the approaching predaters, and he, with more sense of smell ( olfactory) assisted his master tracking prey. Genetic studies indicate that the ancestors of modern dog diverged from gray wolf lineages between twenty thousand to forty thousand years ago. The earliest undisputed dog remains, morphologically distinct from gray wolf, date to 14200 years ago - the Bonn Oberkassel dog buried beside humans. Other more debated findings date back as far as 

33000 years to 36000 years in places like Altai Mountains of Siberia and a cave in Belgium.  This process occured well before the rise of agriculture, or cattle herding. Once the dog human bond was well established, selective breeding to achieve certain results began and the oldest breed were born. 

Donkey the worker

Donkey enters the human world later, with the beginning and spread of agriculture and the rise of settlements, market and transportation. It is a beast of burden, not companion. It performs repetitive labour: carries heavy load and facilitate trade and surplus economy.

There are over forty million donkeys in the world, mostly in underdeveloped countries. An adult male donkey is a jack or jackass. An adult female is jenni or jennet. An immature donkey of either sex is a foal. Jacks mated with a female horse (mare ) produce mule. A stallion when mates with a Jenny produces a hinny. Once, ass was the more common word for donkey.

"Kick your ass"  is a common slang in literary pulp.

The ancestors of modern donkey are the Nubian and Somalian subspecies of African wild ass. Remains of wild ass have been found in Maadi in Lower Egypt. Domestication of donkeys were accomplished long after the domestication of cattle, sheep and goats.

Donkey represents labour without emotional reciprocity, but with strength, endurance and servitude.

They came to northwestern part of Indian subcontinent through Indo-iranian traders or pastoralists. In the Rig veda and Jataka it is mentioned as Gardabha, a metaphor for servility and stubbornness. In India they were the poor man's pack animal - carrying bricks, sand, firewood, salt, grains, and water in arid or hilly regions, where bullocks or camels were costly. Rajasthan, Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu are the states where donkeys are used in salt pans and brick-kilns. Donkey population has been declining in India for the last decade, because of shift to mechanisation.

Dogma: The Ideological Order

When tribes were integrated into societies, a framework that legitimise inequality was found necessary. This was where dogmas originated. It is a mental technology devised by the rulers to rule over the majority.

The dogma explains who must obey, who must work, who must rule, and why the order must be accepted and preserved.  The earliest dogma in the Indian civilizational context is Manusmriti.

Manusmriti systematized social hierarchy. Defined labour as duty, not as contract. Justified obedience through cosmic and moral order ( dharma) Made mobility nearly impossible. And finally provided religious sanction to social inequality. Later new dogmas were evolved: Jainism, Budhism, Christianity, Islam, and Godless Socialism and Communism. All of them were designed to extract obedience of the mass to the seat of power.

Dog joined homo sapiens when the was in hunter gatherer stage; facilitated trust and companionship leading to formation of early social bond. Donkey joined him in agrarian age, and his function was labour, helping in enhancing production.  Dogmas evolved in stratified civilization helping rulers to extract obedience, to institutionalise hierarchy.

If the dog was about shared survival and co-existence, the donkey was about facilitating production and creation of wealth, the dogma was about to control, and maintaining status quo.

Stray Dog Crises 

Dog is no more the companion of man, mainly because of the  change in the ownership. In the beginning there must have been community ownership of dogs.  Early domesticated dogs were integrated into human nomadic groups for hunting and to get alert of predators.  In prehistoric communities dogs were used for hunting, guarding and herding. The primary relationship was one of utility to the entire group. They lived in close proximity to human settlements, possibly following a commensal pathway where they scavenged from human waste and were gradually integrated into the community. So the responsibility directly falls on the community to feed the dogs.  While stray dogs as general population have existed in India for thousands of years, as a native landrace (Indian Pariah Dog), their numbers have always been closely linked to human populations and waste management practices. One of the primary reasons dogs become stray is abandonment by owners due to economic challenges or inability to care for them. The food crisis close to 1970s would have been a significant driver for such abandonment by owners, or less control over owned dogs' movements. Scarcity of food grains in the closing years of sixties, exacerbated the abandonment rate, but the enhancement of fishing by the introduction of mechanised fishing gave them enough waste for survival and multiplication.

The current high population in India of stray dogs is linked to poor waste management, providing them a consistent food source.  The increase in fish processing waste in the 1970s would have acted as a novel, concentrated food source, sustaining larger population of scavengers in specific areas. Dogs cannot live away from human settlements. Effective waste management is the only way to keep down their population. In Kerala, local bodies have an effective waste management system. Local bodies can entrust the feeding responsibility to mushrooming residence associations.

Dogmas are getting irrelevant in modern life.  Dogmatic individuals tend to have inflexible cognitive system, making it difficult to adapt to a new information or changing environment. Throughout history dogmatism has impeded scientific and social progress. Execution of scientists like Galileo, resistance to public health measures or climate change legislation in modern times are examples. Dogma is a belief without evidence and discourages questioning, which undermines critical thinking. Rigid unquestionable beliefs, particularly in politics and religion can lead to social polarization, conflicts and violence.