Dr. P. Amerasinghe writes wittily and elegantly about the problem of stray dogs in Anniewatte. I strongly sympathise with the plight of the residents of Anniewatte, as described in Dr. Amerasinghe’s open letter to the Mayor of Kandy, which appeared in The Sunday Times of July 20 (titled “Four-legged night revellers and two-legged insomniacs”).
However, whatever the rights and wrongs of strategies proposed by “canine welfarists” for controlling the stray dog population, I humbly suggest that there might be some obvious causal connection between the “unsightly mounds of garbage which litter the road-side”, and the offending hounds’ attraction to Dr. Amerasinghe's residential street.
Dr. Amerasinghe says that Anniewatte is “a highly residential area, often dubbed the ‘Seven’ of Kandy”. I find it shocking that even in affluent areas of Colombo, such as Cinnamon Gardens, Nawala and Bataramulla, there are, wherever one goes, piles of rotting garbage by the roadside.
Even outside restaurants you find these excrescences – piles of garbage – swarming with rats, mosquitoes and flies. This seems to me more an “effluent society” than an “affluent society”.
I do not know if Dr. Amerasinghe is a medical doctor. Even if not, the doctor is clearly an educated and intelligent person and, as such, should realise that, dogs or no dogs, piles of rotting garbage outside people's homes constitute a serious health hazard.
Rather than trawling the internet for an exterminator, it might be more cost-effective to look for a waste-disposal operative. If “the cost is of no consequence”, perhaps it could be suggested to the residents of Anniewatte that they get together as a community and pay someone to remove the unsightly mounds of garbage, which are obviously attracting the dogs, and who knows what other unwanted visitors, and to set up a simple neighbourhood system to ensure that the rubbish does not accumulate again in the future.
I would guess that such measures might significantly improve the good doctor's quality of life. It would be worth a try. | 
E-mail