Public Engagement

A ROH-Indies collaboration with Carnatic musician Ragavan Manian for Tamil songs on interspecies cohabitation and multispecies health.

Public and policy debates around street dogs often rely on over-simplified and polarised accounts of people-street dog interactions. The media plays an important role in enabling public debates, shaping positions of elite actors and the lay public, and in influencing policy decisions about human-nature/animal interactions  This programme of activities, a part of Reshaping Canine Coexistence Narratives, is focused on the media to cultivate better understandings of people-dog socio-ecologies and to promote considered engagement with conflict-reduction and health measures that are tailored to socio-ecological contexts. Each region-specific convening provides training and resources for constructive reporting on human-street dog interactions.

A public engagement collaboration by Welfare of Stray Dogs (Mumbai) and ROH-Indies

In collaboration of the Welfare of Stray Dogs, Mumbai, ROH-Indies has initiated public engagement activities to prevent and address conflicts related to street dog feeding. These activities, targeted at members of the public, are focused on i) cultivating better understanding of the complex, multiscalar, ramifications of feeding of free-living animals, ii) refining and disseminating protocols for responsible feeding that enables multispecies health; iii) developing strategies for managing social conflict around feeding.

A public engagement collaboration by Socratus, Samayu and ROH-Indies

ROH-Indies has been investigating the varied public, multispecies, and ecological health dimensions of people-dog relations across socio-culturally and geographically diverse India. Our research suggests that the ways in which the people-dog-health interface is conceptualized and debated in public platforms and policy discussions are not fully reflective of the multidimensionality of ground-level interactions. This, in turn, has a bearing on the suitability of existing and proposed strategies at the dog-health interface, as well as implications for interspecies health outcomes, both rabies and beyond.