"Street dogs and people in India often have a kind of understanding. The dogs aren’t wild, but they aren’t owned either."

"Free-roaming dogs are often supported by the community, but nobody decides when and where they live, eat or mate.... Rahul Sehgal, the India-Asia director for the Humane Society International, who is based in Ahmedabad, said, 'In other places people don’t feed dogs.' But, he said, 'I haven’t seen a single place in India where dogs are not fed by individuals or community.'... There are about 35 million dogs in India... the dogs are mostly outside.... In North America and Western Europe, increasing wealth has led to a change in the status of dogs, which has certainly made rabies control by vaccination much easier. As Dr. Wallace put it, they move off the streets, 'into our yards, then our houses, then our beds.' In India, a big reduction in street dog populations would mark a significant cultural change.... As India becomes more urban and standards of living increase, he said, 'Suddenly people are intolerant of dogs.' People travel to other countries, he said, and 'they don’t see dogs in the street.' Over time, street dogs may disappear in the cities.... If so, that would be a very different India. Despite noise, feces, bites and the always present chance of rabies, the attitude of many Indians toward free-roaming dogs is still extraordinary tolerance."

From "Rabies Kills Tens of Thousands Yearly. Vaccinating Dogs Could Stop It/Sometimes the interests of humans and animals are the same, but humans have to save the animals first" (NYT), which tells about Mission Rabies, an effort to catch and vaccinate street dogs in India, where something like 20,000 people die of rabies every year. The vaccinated dogs are set free, and the vaccination lasts only one year. The vaccinated dog is marked with paint, but the paint lasts only "for a week or so."

ADDED: Something that I don't think is examined in the article: What benefits are provided by wild dogs roaming all over the place? I don't mean the sort of companionship that corresponds to the role of an indoor pet dog. Perhaps the rabies problem is tolerated because the dogs are controlling rats and consuming garbage. They're doing work that provides a greater health benefit — a greater good for a greater number. 20,000 sounds like a lot of loss, a lot of suffering, but it might be outweighed by other health benefits, quite aside from the love and companionship we automatically think of when we think of dogs.