Remaking One Health: Decolonial approaches to street dogs and rabies prevention in India

This study investigates the biosocial conditions that frame the persistence of rabies as a public health concern in India to rethink One Health approaches in post-anthropocentric directions.

Dog-mediated rabies in Asia and Africa is a priority in transnational public health, and One Health approaches have scientific consensus as being key to its prevention (WHO 2019).

India has the highest burden of human rabies globally despite long-standing initiatives, including One Health, on rabies elimination. Our project addresses this impasse.

Challenging the (post)colonial One Health conceptualisation of street dogs as out-of-place disease vectors, our analytical framework of multispecies cultures directs new inter-disciplinary attention to the lived experiences of human and nonhuman animal actors, and to multiple dimensions of people-street dog relations in urban and rural India.

We will examine historical and contemporary transnational influences on dog-related public health agendas; public attitudes and knowledge; everyday interactions between people, dogs, and the biophysical environment; and institutional interventions to advance decolonial concepts and practices for healthy multispecies societies.

Through this fresh approach to rabies, we will reframe how One Health is theorised and pursued, and reconfigure it to enable more equitable approaches to health in a world marked by multispecies risk and vulnerability.