National Institute of Mental Health

It is not a strange phenomenon for hospitals in Sri Lanka to house dogs as other than for temples, hospitals have become the most sought after places to get rid of dogs that people don’t or can’t take care of. These hospitals have no shortage of bins full of thrown-away food, ponds of water and space making them extremely viable places for dogs to thrive in unvaccinated and without sterilization.

At the National Institute of Mental Health in Angoda, these dogs pose more than a slight problem as there are more and more reports of incidents where these animals have actually bitten staff, visitors and even patients. Many solutions have been implemented over the years such as poisoning, systematically dumping them elsewhere and creating a dog pound. Unfortunately none of these solutions have worked for they are either inhumane or impractical and usually only offer very short term fixes.

With the help of the Anti Rabies Campaign and possibly some volunteers, we hope to achieve a more long lasting and practical solution. This is our current plan:-

• Close down the pound so that the dogs are no longer caged
• Within the next two months, we hope to get each and every dog vaccinated.
• These dogs will then be tagged with special collars.
• Our next step would be to make them sterile and by doing so control the dog population to a more manageable level for the future at least.
• By this time we would also have a detailed logged description of the dogs so that not even one of them is unaccounted for.

There are 50 dogs in the pound right now and another 120 that roam the hospital freely. The dogs have become an integral part of the hospital providing security and are considered good for our patients too as they feel more at home and some of them have even grown very fond of them. We do not want to get rid of them; instead we want to make the NIMH a safer environment where the dogs and the people within are able to co-exist with minimal risk. Any sort of help, in the form of better solutions, advice and donations are most welcome as this is a collaborative thing between the hospital and the volunteers and there are financial constraints.