S7E7: Urban Health Histories with Heeral Chhabra
In this episode we delve into how urban health histories can help us to understand changing multispecies health. Heeral Chhabra tells us how the welfare of free-roaming dogs in India was caught up with the colonial history of the country and how rabies saw drastic changes in human-dog relations.

About Heeral Chhabra
Heeral Chhabra is a Post-Doctoral Research Associate with the Remaking One Health: Decolonial Approaches to Street Dogs and Rabies Prevention in India Project at University of Liverpool. She was awarded PhD from the University of Delhi (2022) for her thesis Animal ‘Welfare’, State Regulations and Questions of Cruelty c.1890-1940s which sought to understand animal-human relationships in colonial India through the prism of law. Her career trajectory so far has led her to research positions and teaching endeavours globally. She is also a Visiting Fellow at IASH, Edinburgh University and has previously been a Global History Fellow at International Institute of Social History. She has published widely on matters related to animals in Indian history. She is currently working on her manuscript The Barking Subjects of Empire: The History of Street Dog-Human relations in Colonial India, and also co-editing two books - Animals and South Asian History: Species, People and Environment; and Writing Global History from Global South.

Featured:
Animals and Colonial Indian Archives by Heeral Chhabra
Animals, Agency, and Class: Writing the History of Animals from Below by Jason Hribal
Animals as Experiencing Entities: Theories and Historical Narratives edited by Michael J. Glover, Les Mitchell
The biopolitics of animal being and welfare: dog control and care in the UK and India by Krithika Srinivasan
An analytical framework to understand the problematization of urban (historical) animals by Claudia Hirtenfelder
The Kingdom of Dogs by Matthew Adams
ANIMAL HIGHLIGHT:
Priyanshu Thapliyal tells us about Chintu, a dog who was wounded in a care accident and whose charisma encouraged people to not only act on behalf of her health but on behalf of the welfare of street dogs in the area more generally.
Chintu
“…speaking generally, natives of India, as a rule, do not individually own dogs. There are, in villages and bazaars, dogs which generally attach themselves to certain batches of houses and go around to them at meal times and receive the remains of the meals; they are possibly recognised by the owners of the houses as an adjunct and they will feed them if they appear, but it is the dog who comes and attaches himself to the houses and not the owner who takes a dog and keeps it. In very few, if in any case, does a Native keep a dog in the way that an European does.” (Observation by the Government advocate in Punjab; NAI, Home Department, Municipalities- A, August 1900, No. 15-26).
Thank you to Animals in Philosophy, Politics, Law and Ethics (A.P.P.L.E) for sponsoring this podcast; Remaking One Health (ROH) Indies for sponsoring this season; Gordon Clarke (Instagram: @_con_sol_) for the bed music, Jeremy John for the logo, Rebecca Shen for her design work, Priyanshu Thapliyal for the Animal Highlight, and Christiaan Mentz for his audio editing. This episode was produced by the host Claudia Towne Hirtenfelder.

