Actor Nadia Afgan is one of Pakistan’s most outspoken voices when it comes to animal rights and has often spoken up against dog culling. She believes the way society has normalised animal cruelty is bad for everyone, especially the country’s children.
Appearing on the podcast The Street Talks Back on Friday, Afgan said Pakistanis were okay with killing dogs en masse and taught their children to fear the animals based on “colonial” ideas.
“We are taught to love things that are good and pretty. For dogs, we are told they are filthy, that they bite, we are taught to fear them from when we are children.”
Host Huma Haq — who founded the Jaandar Animal Welfare Organisation — said the way dogs walk on the streets of Pakistan as opposed to somewhere like Turkiye showed how cruelly society treats the voiceless animals. Afgan said these weren’t the same streets she grew up on.
“I don’t think the streets are safe for children, I don’t think they’re safe for animals, for dogs, for women, anyone really. Maybe they’re safe for men? And even then, maybe they’re not safe for a lot of men as well.”
She said she had a house and the area inside the walls of the house was hers. She could decide who to let in and who to keep out. But the street outside her house wasn’t hers in the same way — it belonged more to the animals that lived on it.
“They lived here long before we did, we built our cities [on their land]. Dogs, we brought them here, domesticated them and then left them. We are the ones who bring dogs home and then abandon them. Where will they go?”
The actor said she had been asked by people in her neighbourhood not to walk her dogs — a Labrador retriever and a husky — outside for fear that they might hurt kids. She said she responded by telling the neighbourhood that the dogs don’t hurt children — or anyone — and she has made it a point to introduce her dogs to kids whenever they’re out.
Afgan said trying to “fix the problem of rabies, which doesn’t affect every dog, maybe one in every 100” by culling them was teaching children that “violence is the answer to everything”.
The actor said those in power had misplaced priorities when it came to animal welfare, where they were willing to pay for poison and bullets to kill dogs, but refused to sponsor programmes to control the spread of rabies with vaccinations.
Instead, she said, the streets would be safer if we took care of stray dogs.
“Dogs, have territories, they protect their territories and they protect your children. The man on a bike who touches your kids while they’re playing in the streets… the one who kidnaps young boys; you feed these stray dogs, give them water and see how anyone dares to approach your kids.”
Talking about her own childhood, Afgan said she had a dog growing up in the 80s and her mother was fond of rescuing animals. That, she said, was a generational trait, because her grandmother also had a lot of animals at her house.
She also dismissed the notion that loving animals was a luxury only the well-off could afford. She said her mother’s family in Quetta was not rich, but her grandmother had love in her heart for all sorts of animals.
“My mother grew up with nine siblings and a lot of animals. Ducks, chickens, cows, buffaloes, goats and dogs and cats and birds. She grew up loving animals, which she passed on to us.”
