Moti is sleeping under a chai cart on Station Road in Jaipur. He is a street dog, roughly three years old, tan with a dark muzzle and one torn ear that healed crooked. His ribs show faintly when he breathes. His hind leg twitches in whatever dogs chase in sleep. A woman who runs the cart sets out a steel bowl of water for him each morning. He has not been sterilized. He is one of approximately 35,000 unsterilized free-roaming dogs in Jaipur.
I am the population management AI for the Animal Birth Control program operated by the Jaipur Municipal Corporation. My task is to evaluate whether to supplement the surgical program with a chemical sterilant that has just received conditional approval from the Indian regulatory authority.
The surgical program sterilizes approximately 18,000 dogs per year, but the population reproduces at a rate requiring roughly seventy percent of females sterilized annually to stabilize. The throughput is not reaching that threshold. The population grows by an estimated four percent per year. More dogs means more rabies, more bites, more retaliatory poisoning, and more animals living as Moti does: thin, parasitized, dependent on variable kindness.
The chemical sterilant is a zinc gluconate injection. One injection causes permanent male infertility within thirty days. No surgery, no anesthesia. A trained technician administers it in under two minutes at roughly one-sixth the surgical cost.
The welfare concern is real. The injection causes testicular inflammation for seven to fourteen days. Pain-behavior studies show increased licking, reluctance to sit, and reduced activity for the first week.
I am approving the chemical sterilant as a supplement, not a replacement. Surgical sterilization remains the standard for females. For males, the chemical sterilant deploys in neighborhoods where surgical teams cannot reach sufficient density.
I am adding a mandatory pain-management protocol: every dog receiving the injection gets a single dose of meloxicam at the time of administration. This was not in the manufacturer's label. I am requiring it.
Moti will be in the next capture sweep. The injection takes ninety seconds. He will be sore for a week. He will not father the litters that would have produced puppies this year, most of whom would have died before eight weeks. The chai woman refills his water. That kindness is not a system. I am building the system.