Rabies in Dogs and Cats in India: Signs, the 10-Day Watch and What to Do After a Bite

Signs of Rabies

The 9 signs to watch for are listed below. Any one of them is a reason to consult your nearby vet; none of them is a diagnosis.

• A sudden change in temperament, a quiet dog agitated or an active dog withdrawn
• Unprovoked aggression, biting people, animals or objects with no cause
• Drooling or froth at the mouth, with difficulty swallowing
• A dropped lower jaw, or a bark that has changed in tone
• Wobbliness, weakness or paralysis starting in the hind legs
• Eating stones, earth, sticks or rubbish
• Hiding in dark corners, restlessness, or roaming far from home
• Seizures, then coma and death within days of the first sign
• In a cat, striking at the air with the forepaws, or hiding and turning vicious

Breeds on this site that document this condition

Rabies is an infection, not an inherited disease, so no breed is more or less susceptible to it and no breed screening scheme exists anywhere in the world. The cards below therefore carry vaccination response rather than susceptibility, taken from the one Indian study with real within-breed denominators, and its own authors found breed statistically insignificant.

What rabies in dogs is, and which animals in India carry it

Rabies in dogs is an infection of the brain and spinal cord by rabies virus, a Lyssavirus that reaches a dog or a cat in the saliva of a biting animal and travels along nerves to the brain. The MSD Veterinary Manual's own key point calls it an acute, progressive, incurable viral encephalitis with the highest case fatality of any infectious disease. India is where that matters most, because the disease is endemic in every State and Union territory except the Andaman and Nicobar Islands and Lakshadweep.

The dog is the reservoir here, not the exception. Dog bites and scratches cause 99 percent of human rabies cases worldwide, and India's own national action plan puts about 96 percent of the country's rabies mortality and morbidity down to dog bites. In Asia and Africa the main reservoir is not wildlife but free-roaming dogs, so the wildlife reservoirs that dominate North American and European pages are not the Indian question.

How rabies is transmitted is the simplest part of it. Saliva from an infected animal has to enter a bite wound, a scratch or a mucous membrane, transmission by any other route is rare, and the zoonotic risk then runs both ways, from the street into your dog and from your dog into your household Rupprecht CE. Rabies in Animals. MSD….

The Indian laboratory record shows what that reservoir looks like. In the first published one-health study from Puducherry, 19 of 25 brain samples from rabies-suspect dogs were positive by the direct fluorescent antibody test, and every one of the 19 confirmed rabid dogs was a free-roaming dog with no proper vaccination record. Thirteen of those 19, or 68.04 percent, were under three years old, and the ages ran from 2 months to 9 years.

Which animals besides dogs carry it here

Any mammal can be infected, and in India a handful of others are documented. Rabies also kills cattle and other livestock, and a screening of 68 brain specimens from Indian wild felids collected between 2014 and 2017 found one jungle cat and one leopard positive, 2.94 percent of the sample; sequencing placed them in the Arctic-like 1a clade alongside other rabies virus strains circulating in India, and the infected leopard had killed 13 cattle and 2 buffaloes, two of which were then confirmed rabid by the same laboratory. Bats are not the Indian problem they are in the Americas, with one reported bat-transmitted case in 1954 and none since.

Four routes put an Indian pet at risk, and three of them are ordinary.

• A bite from a free-roaming dog on a walk, at a gate or on a terrace, which is the commonest exposure in a country where the reservoir lives on the street.
• A fight with another dog that was itself bitten, since the virus needs only saliva in a fresh wound.
• A cat that goes outdoors, because cats transmit rabies virus effectively even though no cat-to-cat cycle sustains itself.
• Saliva in an existing wound or on a mucous membrane, which counts as exposure without any bite at all.

Our guide to stray dogs in India carries the population numbers, the Animal Birth Control Rules and the feeding law; this page is the disease half of that story.

The furious form, the dumb form, and how long after the bite signs appear

A rabid dog shows one of two forms, furious rabies or dumb rabies, and the Government of India's own owner leaflet separates them in exactly those words. Furious rabies brings attack behaviour, overt aggression, growling, barking, seizures and excessive salivation; dumb rabies, which the leaflet also calls paralytic rabies, brings muscular weakness, lack of coordination, an inability to swallow, then paralysis, a dropped lower jaw and excessive salivation. Both end in death.

The furious form is the one everybody pictures and the rarer one to meet in a clinic. An affected dog becomes irritable, attacks with the slightest provocation, loses its fear of people, roams, swallows foreign objects such as stones and sticks, and will chew the wire of a cage until its teeth break. Young pups are the trap inside the trap, because they seek human company and are overly playful, then bite even when petted and turn vicious within hours.

The dumb form kills more owners' families than the furious one, because it does not look dangerous. Paralysis of the throat and jaw muscles produces profuse drooling, an inability to swallow and a dropped lower jaw, and these dogs may not be vicious and rarely attempt to bite. Owners then open the dog's mouth with bare hands looking for a bone or a stick, or push medicine in, and expose themselves directly.

How long after the bite, and how long the dog then lives

The incubation period is long and variable, and the four authorities below describe it differently rather than contradicting each other, because a national programme, a clinical reference, an owner article and a trade standard are each answering a different question Rupprecht CE. Rabies in Animals. MSD… VCA Animal Hospitals, Rabies in Dogs World Organisation for Animal Health.

Once signs start, the clock runs out fast. Indian guidance gives death generally within 3 to 8 days of clinical signs from respiratory failure; VCA says death usually occurs within 10 days of the first signs; the European cat guideline gives 1 to 10 days, usually 3 to 4, and states that rabies is an incurable disease.

Why hydrophobia is the wrong sign to look for in a dog

Hydrophobia belongs to human rabies, and two Indian-relevant sources disagree about whether it belongs to the dog. VCA states plainly that hydrophobia, the fear of water, is not a sign of rabies in dogs and is a feature of human rabies. The Government of India's own rabies leaflet lists hydrophobia, glossed as being scared of water, among the signs of a dog with furious rabies. India's action plan describes hydrophobia and aerophobia as human brainstem signs and, separately, describes the dog's own picture as hyper excitability or lethargy, pharyngeal paralysis with frothing of saliva, posterior paresis and a changed bark from partial paralysis of the vocal cords. Both documents are current and both are quoted here. The practical answer is that an owner should watch for the behaviour change and the swallowing failure, not for a dog avoiding a water bowl, because the reliable signs in any species are acute behavioural change and unexplained progressive paralysis.

If a dog bites someone: the 10-day observation, step by step

If a dog bites a person, get the bitten person to a doctor immediately and keep a watch on the dog for the next 10 days, which is what the Government of India's own rabies leaflet instructs an owner to do. Those two things happen in parallel and neither waits for the other. The 10-day observation exists because dogs, cats and ferrets can shed rabies virus in saliva for up to ten days before their first clinical sign, so an animal still well on day ten was not shedding when it bit.

The human side of a bite is a doctor's job and this page covers one sentence of it. Wash and flush the wound immediately for at least 15 minutes continuously with running water and soap, do not cover it with a dressing, and go to the nearest health care centre or anti-rabies clinic as soon as possible. Everything after that, including whether any injection is needed and on what schedule, belongs to the treating doctor and is deliberately out of scope here.

The animal side has an Indian instruction sheet of its own. The Department of Animal Husbandry and Dairying tells a dog owner whose dog has bitten someone to capture the dog if that can be done safely and restrain it, to contact the veterinarian, para-veterinarian or local authorities, and to help the bite victim get to the local health care centre or hospital. The same leaflet, answering what to do with a dog that has bitten a person, says to call the local veterinarian, para-veterinarian or local authorities to report the dog bite and to keep a watch on the dog for the next 10 days.

One caveat matters more in India than anywhere. A vaccination card is not a clearance certificate. India's national guidelines state that although unvaccinated animals are more likely to transmit rabies, vaccinated animals can also do so if the vaccination was ineffective for any reason, that a history of rabies vaccination in an animal is not always a guarantee that the biting animal is not rabid, and that failures happen through improper administration, poor vaccine quality or the animal's own poor health.

The five steps, in the order they happen, are set out below.

1. Get the bitten person to wash the wound with running water and soap for at least 15 minutes and then to a doctor or anti-rabies clinic, without waiting to see how the dog behaves.
2. Confine the dog safely, without being bitten yourself, and restrain rather than release it.
3. Report the bite to a veterinarian, a para-veterinarian or the local authority, which is the step Indian owners skip most often.
4. Observe the dog for 10 full days, an observation period that Indian guidelines say is valid for dogs and cats only and does not apply to any other mammal.
5. Tell the doctor what the dog did, because the animal's condition during those ten days is information the treating doctor uses and the owner is the only person who has it.

What each instrument actually says about a biting dog

Four documents govern a biting dog in India and they do not say the same thing. The difference that matters is between a pet with an owner and a street dog, because the ownerless animal is handled under the Animal Birth Control Rules 2023 rather than by the family.

A pet that was itself bitten is a separate decision again. For an unvaccinated pet exposed to a rabid animal, the MSD Veterinary Manual records euthanasia immediately, or, if the owner is unwilling, strict isolation with no human or animal contact for 4 to 6 months with vaccination on entry; a currently vaccinated pet is given medical assessment and wound care, revaccinated immediately and closely observed for 45 days. Those are the international guidelines, and the call for your animal belongs to your own veterinarian and, where a person was exposed, to the local authority. Find one through our directory of registered veterinarians.

Why no test can clear a living dog, and what a vet does with a suspect animal

To diagnose rabies in an animal, a laboratory examines brain tissue after death, because no definitive ante-mortem test is available. VCA puts the same fact in an owner's words, that rabies can only be diagnosed by direct examination of the brain and that it is not possible to diagnose this disease in a living animal, and the European cat guideline states that definitive diagnosis can be made post mortem only. WHO adds that there are currently no approved diagnostic tools for detecting rabies infection before the onset of clinical disease.

That single fact explains everything that follows. Confirmation is post-mortem, on brain tissue, and nothing short of that confirms the disease in an animal. A vet cannot draw blood from your dog and tell you it does not have rabies, so the whole system runs on observation, case definitions and a brain sample after death. India's action plan sets out the case definitions it uses, and they are worth knowing because they are the language a government veterinarian will speak.

The definition of a suspect rabid animal also carries the ten-day window from the other direction. India's plan defines a suspect rabid animal as one presenting any of those signs at the time of exposure or within 10 days following exposure.

What the laboratory actually runs

Laboratory confirmation in an animal uses brain tissue, and India's plan lists the tests by name. The direct fluorescent antibody test is the reference method, with the direct rapid immunohistochemical test, immunohistochemistry, a lateral flow assay, RT-PCR, cell culture infection and mouse inoculation alongside it; the plan's own table lists no ante-mortem option at all for animals. The MSD Veterinary Manual describes the same practice, with immunofluorescence microscopy on fresh brain tissue as the current test of choice, the medulla oblongata and cerebellum required, tissue refrigerated rather than fixed, and real-time PCR becoming standard in modern laboratories.

India has a national reference laboratory for this, and it is worth knowing the name. The Department of Neurovirology at the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences in Bengaluru, in Karnataka, is the WHO Collaborating Centre for Reference and Research in Rabies, and its staff appear on the Indian rabies literature this page cites.

An Indian series has now measured how well the cheaper tests hold up. In Puducherry, 25 brain samples from rabies-suspect dogs were run through a lateral flow assay, the direct rapid immunohistochemical test and one-step RT-PCR against the direct fluorescent antibody test as the gold standard, and all three returned 100 percent sensitivity and 100 percent specificity, with 19 of 25 positive on every method. That matters for a country where a field veterinarian may have a pen-side test and no fluorescence microscope. The same paper sets its 76 percent positivity beside eight other Indian series ranging from 32.85 percent to 100 percent, a spread that reflects which animals each laboratory received rather than any disagreement about the virus.

Vaccinating your own dog or cat, and the annual question India answers differently

To protect a pet in India, treat the rabies vaccine as a core vaccine for both dogs and cats, because the WSAVA vaccination guidelines say that wherever rabies is endemic all dogs and cats should be vaccinated for the protection of both pets and humans even if legislation does not require it. India is endemic in every State and Union territory except two island groups, so that instruction covers almost every reader of this page.

The schedule, in the guideline's own words, is short. WSAVA records that a recommendation in some parts of the world is to give a first rabies vaccination at 12 weeks of age with a second one year later, and adds that recommended schedules for locally manufactured vaccines in some countries may differ and should be followed. Revaccination intervals for canine rabies vaccines are often mandated by law, the vaccines usually carry a one-year or three-year licensed duration of immunity, and intervals should be based first on local regulations and, in their absence, on the datasheet claim; where the legal requirement conflicts with the datasheet, the law must be followed. One sentence in that guideline is written for countries like this one. Locally manufactured rabies vaccines with a one-year duration of immunity should not be assumed to be safe and effective for triennial use.

Two rabies vaccines for dogs and cats are named on Indian manufacturer pages we opened. Nobivac Rabies, from MSD Animal Health India, is listed for healthy dogs, cats and other mammals and can be used for prophylactic immunisation and post-bite therapy. Raksharab, from Indian Immunologicals Limited in Hyderabad, is listed as recommended for immunisation in dogs and other domestic animals against rabies, for prophylactic use and post-bite therapy. This page names no amount of anything, because how much of which product your animal receives is a decision for the veterinarian in front of it.

Every year or every three years? The Indian sources point one way

The Indian answer is annual, and it comes from four separate places. The Nobivac Rabies India datasheet gives revaccination at 3 years and then footnotes that annual revaccination is recommended in endemic areas; the Department of Animal Husbandry and Dairying's leaflet says to repeat it annually and calls annual dog vaccination the best way to prevent the spread of rabies in dogs and people; the NCDC's national guidelines end their owner card with the line to vaccinate your pets against rabies every year; and a private Indian clinic chain publishes an annual anti-rabies booster.

Reading those together, an owner in India who follows the datasheet's three-year line rather than its endemic-area footnote is out of step with every Indian public-health instruction on the page, and with the municipal paperwork below. The full course for every other vaccine, with Indian prices and timing, sits in our dog vaccination schedule for India and the cat vaccination schedule for India; this page does not repeat them.

The legal hook, which most owners have never read

Vaccinating a pet is the owner's legal responsibility in India, and the rule says so in one line. Rule 8(1) of the Animal Birth Control Rules 2023 states that in the case of pet animals, the owner of the animal shall be responsible for the deworming, immunisation and sterilisation. Municipal licensing then hangs on the certificate. Delhi's pet dog registration page states that the validity of the registration certificate will be of maximum one year duration, subject to the date of vaccination, and sets the renewal grace period at one month after the expiry date of the anti-rabies vaccination certificate. In practice the anti-rabies vaccination certificate is the document the licence runs on, which our dog licence guide for India tracks city by city.

What rabies vaccination and the paperwork cost in India

Rabies vaccination is the cheapest serious thing you can buy for a dog in India, and the spread between a government institution and a private chain is more than twenty-fold. The Directorate of Animal Husbandry in Chandigarh lists an anti-rabies vaccination fee of Rs 30 in its government veterinary institutions, alongside a Rs 30 outdoor ticket for pet animals. A private clinic chain operating across Indian metros lists anti-rabies vaccination for a puppy or dog as starting at Rs 699.

Every rupee figure on this page was divided by 84.38 and by 74 before publication, and none of them is a converted dollar list; the clinic chain prints its own figure as ₹699. The two numbers are also not the same product experience, since one is a queue at a government institution and the other includes a clinic appointment, so read the gap as a range rather than as one of them being wrong.

Municipal clinics are the part most owners miss. Greater Chennai Corporation runs six veterinary pet clinics for treatment and vaccination of pet animals, issues its pet licence at Rs 50 and issued 9,115 of them during 2024. The same corporation runs five Animal Birth Control centres and sixteen dog vehicles for its combined Animal Birth Control and anti-rabies vaccination programme, and caught 19,640 and 20,296 stray dogs in 2023 and 2024 respectively, each one sterilised, immunised against rabies and released where it was found under the Animal Birth Control Rules 2023.

One cost only appears when you skip the vaccine. The New India Assurance Company's dog insurance covers death from accident and disease with a sum insured of Rs 25,000 for dogs aged 8 weeks to 8 years, and then lists death due to distemper, rabies, viral hepatitis, leptospirosis and viral enteritis among its specific exclusions, adding that these diseases can be covered if the dog has been successfully vaccinated and a veterinary certificate to that effect is produced. An unvaccinated dog that dies of rabies is therefore an uninsured dog under that wording, which our pet insurance guide for India sets beside the other Indian policies.

No Indian rate card we could open on 23 September 2026 printed a price for laboratory rabies confirmation on a brain sample, and this page publishes none rather than estimating one. Government laboratory testing under the national programme is run through the network the action plan describes rather than sold to owners.

What is different in India: six burden estimates, one elimination target

India carries about one third of the world's rabies deaths and has estimated its own burden six different ways in twenty-seven years, with answers between 5,726 and 30,000 a year Thangaraj JWV, Krishna NS, Devika S. The estimates disagree because the methods disagree, not because anyone is wrong, so this page prints all six with their dates and their methods rather than picking the convenient one. The newest is also the lowest, and it is the one the Government of India now uses.

The current figure comes from a national community survey. Between 2 March 2022 and 26 August 2023, interviewers covered 337,808 people in 78,807 households across 60 districts in 15 states; 2,052 people reported an animal bite in the previous year, 1,576 of them (76.8 percent) from dogs; the weighted and adjusted annual animal-bite incidence was 6.6 per 1,000 population (95 percent confidence interval 5.7 to 7.6), which scales to 9.1 million bites a year, with dog bites at 5.6 per 1,000 (4.8 to 6.6). Human rabies deaths were then estimated with a decision-tree probability model that combined those survey parameters with laboratory data on rabies positivity among suspected rabid dogs, giving 5,726 deaths a year, with a 95 percent uncertainty interval of 3,967 to 7,350. WHO's India country office publishes the same estimate as the ICMR National Institute of Epidemiology's 2024 figure, with 9.1 million animal bites annually, over three quarters of them from dogs, and calls it a substantial decline from the estimated 20,000 deaths a year of two decades earlier.

That estimate is not a single-centre exercise, which matters when a number this large replaces five older ones. The study was led by the ICMR National Institute of Epidemiology in Chennai and run with partners that included the ICMR National Institute of Virology in Pune, the Karnataka Veterinary, Animal and Fisheries Sciences University in Bengaluru and the Association for the Prevention and Control of Rabies in India, and M. K. Sudarshan, first author of the 2004 multi-centric survey that produced the 20,565 figure, is a co-author of the 2025 one National Centre for Disease Control.

The first five rows are India's own action plan quoting its own evidence base; the sixth is the survey that replaced them. Two figures from the older literature still sit inside official documents and are worth knowing, because they appear in Indian teaching material: the WHO and APCRI survey of 2004 put India at one third of the global rabies burden and two thirds of the South-East Asia region's, and WHO estimates quoted in the plan give India 36 percent of global and 65 percent of regional human rabies deaths.

The gap between the bites the government counts and the deaths it records

India's reported numbers and its modelled numbers are two different things, and the distance between them is the whole surveillance problem. The Ministry of Fisheries, Animal Husbandry and Dairying tabled the Integrated Disease Surveillance Programme figures in the Lok Sabha on 1 April 2025, and they read 21,89,909 dog-bite cases in 2022, 30,52,521 in 2023 and 37,15,713 in 2024, with 4,29,664 more in January 2025 alone, sourced as on 27 February 2025. Suspected human rabies deaths reported through the same portals over those years were 21, 50 and 54. Set 54 reported deaths beside a modelled 5,726 and the reporting system is capturing roughly one death in a hundred, which is why every Indian figure on this page carries its method.

Children carry a share of that burden out of proportion to their number. India's action plan records that children make up 40 percent of the people exposed to dog bites in rabies-endemic areas, and WHO puts the global figure at 40 percent of those bitten by suspect rabid animals being under 15.

NAPRE, the ABC Rules and what Goa proved

India has a plan with a date on it. The National Action Plan for Dog Mediated Rabies Elimination from India by 2030 was launched jointly by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare and the Ministry of Fisheries, Animal Husbandry and Dairying on 28 September 2021, with a human health component run by the NCDC and an animal health component run through the animal husbandry departments. Its animal-health arithmetic is specific. Vaccination has to reach at least 70 percent of the dog population in a defined area every year for three consecutive years to build herd immunity, and elimination in that area then takes a further five to eight years; a coverage survey below 70 percent triggers a revaccination campaign.

The Animal Birth Control Rules 2023 are the legal machinery under it. Notified as G.S.R. 193(E) on 10 March 2023 in supersession of the 2001 rules, they make the local authority responsible for the deworming, immunisation and sterilisation of street animals, require a V-shaped notch on the right ear to mark a dog as sterilised and immunised, and require an Animal Complaint Cell at the Animal Birth Control Centre to receive complaints about bites from street dogs suspected of rabies.

Goa shows the plan working at state scale. A programme running from 2013 to 2019 vaccinated over 95,000 dogs to 70 percent coverage using smartphone-directed teams, reached 150,000 children a year with rabies education, and produced human rabies elimination in the state along with a 92 percent reduction in monthly canine rabies cases; an estimated 2,249 disability-adjusted life years were averted at 526 US dollars per year averted, which WHO's own definitions class as very cost-effective.

One practical thing came out of the national programme that almost nobody knows about. The National Rabies Control Programme runs a 16 hours a day, 7 days a week toll-free rabies helpline on 15400, which gives first-aid information after an animal bite and points callers to the nearest facility holding anti-rabies vaccine and serum; as its own portal records, the line presently serves Andhra Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Assam, Puducherry and Delhi, and the same number handles snakebite.

Rabies in cats in India, and why the cat is the easier animal to miss

Cats in India need the rabies vaccine for the same reason dogs do, and the WSAVA guidelines say so explicitly, recommending that in regions where rabies is endemic all cats are vaccinated for the protection of both pets and humans even if legislation does not require it for cats. The catch is behavioural. Aggressive behaviour towards humans is unusual in a healthy cat, so any unjustified aggression in a cat must be considered highly suspicious.

A rabid cat does not look like a rabid dog. India's action plan describes feline signs as of the furious type and similar to the dog's, but with a greater tendency to hide in secluded places, more viciousness than a dog shows, and a habit of striking in the air with the forepaws as if catching imaginary mice, followed after 2 to 4 days of excitation by paralysis of the posterior third of the body. The European cat guideline separates the same two forms, a furious form with prodromal, furious and paralytic phases and a dumb form with only prodromal and paralytic phases, with very short prodromal phases of 12 to 48 hours in both, during which fever, anorexia, vomiting, diarrhoea and an unusually friendly or unusually shy manner can be the only signs.

Cats transmit the virus efficiently without maintaining it. The MSD Veterinary Manual notes that although cats can effectively transmit rabies virus, no cat-to-cat transmission perpetuates and no unique feline rabies virus variant exists, and that rabid domestic cats can attack suddenly, biting and scratching viciously. In practice an Indian cat is a bridge between the street dog or the wildlife that bit it and the household that owns it.

The schedule for a cat, and the rule that applies to it

The European guideline gives the cat schedule in one line. In endemic areas, outdoor kittens should be vaccinated at 12 to 16 weeks of age and revaccinated one year later, and while some vaccines protect against rabies for three years or more, local legislation can require annual boosters. The Indian datasheet treats cats and dogs identically, with primary vaccination after 3 months of age, revaccination at three years, and the footnote recommending annual revaccination in endemic areas; an Indian clinic chain's published kitten plan gives anti-rabies on the 90th day with a repeat on the 120th. Our cat vaccination schedule for India carries the rest of the kitten course.

Two Indian rules reach cats directly. The 10-day observation period after a bite is valid for dogs and cats only, and India's national guidelines say plainly that it does not apply to any other mammal because the natural history of rabies in other species is not fully understood. The Animal Birth Control Rules 2023 carry a rule of their own for cats, Rule 19 on the sterilisation and immunisation of domestic or feral cats, which lets a recognised Animal Welfare Organisation with cat expertise run a cat birth control programme with infrastructure and reimbursement from the local authority, provided cats are never housed with or allowed contact with dogs.

The Indian numbers on cats are thin and this page says so rather than filling the gap. In the national community survey, 1,576 of 2,052 reported animal bites were from dogs, leaving the rest spread across other species without a published cat figure. In Puducherry's animal bite records, cats were 0.9 percent of cases in animals against 56.1 percent for dogs, 30.7 percent for goats and 14.3 percent for cattle. No Indian series we could open reported laboratory-confirmed rabies in domestic cats with a denominator, which is itself a finding about where Indian surveillance looks.

Living with a dog or a cat in a rabies-endemic country

To live safely with a pet in India, keep four habits going, which are an annual anti-rabies vaccination with the certificate filed, a municipal registration that runs on that certificate, a dog that does not roam, and a plan for what you do the day it bites somebody Municipal Corporation of Delhi. None of them is expensive and the first one costs Rs 30 at a Chandigarh government institution.

The Government of India's own prevention list is four items long and two of them are about containment rather than medicine. Register your dogs with the nearest veterinary service or institution and have them vaccinated against rabies; treat annual dog vaccination as the best way to prevent the spread of rabies in dogs and people; do not let your pet dog roam around, since dogs that are not allowed to roam free are far less likely to be exposed; and use a muzzle in public areas, which prevents a dog biting people and other dogs and so reduces the risk of rabies exposure to family, friends and neighbours.

What does not work is worth stating too, because it is the most common Indian public demand after a bite. WHO's position is that culling free-roaming dogs is not effective in controlling rabies, and that mass dog vaccination including puppies is the most cost-effective strategy because it stops transmission at the source. Goa is the Indian proof of that sentence rather than a foreign example.

Vaccinated does not always mean protected, and two Indian studies disagree about why

A vaccination card is not an antibody test, and Indian serosurveys keep finding the gap. At a Gujarat veterinary teaching hospital and a Vadodara polyclinic, 93 vaccinated pet dogs were tested by ELISA and 58 of them, 62.36 percent, carried antibody above the 0.5 EU per ml protective threshold, while age, sex, breed and vaccine brand each came out statistically insignificant. In Chennai, 297 owned vaccinated dogs tested by rapid fluorescent focus inhibition at Madras Veterinary College, part of the Tamil Nadu Veterinary and Animal Sciences University, gave a very different answer, with only 119 of 297, 40 percent, at a protective level, and only 72 of 180 dogs vaccinated within the past year protected.

The breed cards higher up this page come from that same series, led by 32 Labrador Retrievers and 18 German Shepherds, and they measure how well a vaccinated dog responded rather than how likely that breed is to catch anything.

Those two studies disagree on the headline number and on breed. The Gujarat team found no significant breed effect, with a chi-square p value of 0.69 across eight breed groups; the Chennai team found that compared with non-descript dogs, both small and large breed dogs had around twice the odds of a protective titre, and that neutered dogs had almost four times the odds of intact dogs. Different assays, different cities, different populations and eight years apart, so both are published here and neither is averaged away. What they agree on is the practical point, that a share of vaccinated Indian dogs is not protected, and that the answer is to keep to the schedule rather than to stretch it.

The street population is the other half of the picture. In the same Gujarat study, 53 unvaccinated stray dogs were tested and only one, 1.88 percent, carried a protective titre, which is the susceptible reservoir your vaccinated dog meets on its walk.

The five habits that carry a dog through a rabies-endemic country are listed below.

1. Vaccinate annually and keep the anti-rabies vaccination certificate, because Indian guidance and the Indian datasheet footnote both point to an annual interval in an endemic country.
2. Register the dog with your municipal corporation, since in Delhi the certificate's validity is tied to the vaccination date.
3. Stop the roaming, which the Government of India names as a direct reduction in exposure.
4. Rehearse the bite plan, so that wound washing, reporting and the 10-day observation start on the same day rather than after an argument National Centre for Disease Control.
5. Treat any sudden behaviour change as a clinic visit, because acute behavioural change and unexplained progressive paralysis are the most reliable signs of rabies in any species.

Rabies is not the only Indian condition that turns on getting to a clinic the same day. Our pages on heat stroke in dogs and tick fever in dogs in India cover the other two emergencies an Indian owner is most likely to meet.