What Four Days of Durga Puja Do to Animals Living Near a Pandal

Dogs hear frequencies between 40 Hz and 65,000 Hz, roughly twice the upper range of human hearing. Dhak drums produce deep, resonant beats that carry far below the threshold of human discomfort but sit squarely in the range that triggers a dog's threat-detection response. The problem is not volume alone, it is unpredictability. A single sustained loud sound is stressful. A sound that stops, restarts, accelerates during aarti, and then cuts out entirely at 2 a.m. keeps the nervous system in a state of unresolved alertness. Cortisol, the primary stress hormone in mammals, does not spike once and return to baseline; repeated unpredictable stimuli keep it elevated across hours. In street dogs already living with baseline anxiety from territory competition and food insecurity, four days of this can suppress appetite, trigger diarrhoea, and cause stereotypic pacing that persists after the pandal comes down.

Cats respond differently but no less intensely. Their hearing range extends to around 79,000 Hz, and their threat response to sudden loud sound is more explosive, immediate flight rather than the freeze-and-assess pattern common in dogs. Cats living in pandal lanes during Puja are typically absent from their usual spots for the duration. They are not adapting; they have displaced into quieter zones, often without access to their established food sources.

Dhunuchi burns coconut shell, camphor, and dried coconut husk. The particulate matter it releases is fine enough to reach the lower respiratory tract in both humans and animals. Street animals have no option to move indoors. A dog sleeping under a pandal awning for four evenings of aarti is breathing concentrated smoke at ground level, where particulates settle heaviest, for cumulative hours. Birds nesting in trees directly above pandal structures face the same exposure from above.

For animals with pre-existing respiratory conditions, common in street dogs in Indian cities, where canine distemper and kennel cough circulate, this is not a minor irritant. Smoke-induced bronchospasm can trigger coughing fits that last days beyond the exposure. Pigeons and house sparrows, both of which nest in the eaves and ledges of the kinds of old buildings that pandal neighbourhoods tend to occupy in Kolkata and other Bengali cities, show measurable nest abandonment during high-particulate events. The chicks, if present in October, cannot relocate.

A street dog in a pandal lane during Saptami evening is navigating a crowd moving at human walking pace in all directions, with no predictable gap and no elevated vantage point. The animal cannot see more than a few feet. Feet are everywhere. The noise is omnidirectional. This is a textbook trigger for tonic immobility, the freeze response that precedes panic flight, in animals that are not socialised to dense crowds. Unsocialised dogs that freeze and then bolt are the animals most likely to be injured: struck by a vehicle on the road beyond the crowd, or kicked by a startled pedestrian.

Smaller animals face a more direct threat. Hedgehogs, mongoose, and the various small rodents that share urban ecosystems with humans are almost entirely absent from pandal zones during the festival, not because they leave but because they go underground or into wall cavities and stop foraging. For animals that need to eat daily to maintain body temperature, particularly juveniles, four days of suppressed foraging has a measurable cost.

The practical interventions are modest but not trivial. Feeding stations for street dogs and cats should be moved to the quietest available lane at the edge of the pandal perimeter before Shashthi, not during the festival when the animals are already displaced and harder to locate. Water bowls matter more than usual: stress and heat both drive dehydration, and an animal that has stopped eating will still drink if water is accessible. Puja committees in several Kolkata neighbourhoods have begun designating one quiet lane as a no-generator, low-speaker zone, this is not silence, but it is a meaningful reduction in the unpredictability that drives cortisol elevation.

For owned pets, the window is the week before. A dog that has been gradually exposed to recorded dhak and crowd noise at increasing volume over seven days shows significantly less acute stress response than one encountering the real thing cold. This is not desensitisation in the clinical sense, it does not require a behaviourist, but incremental exposure blunts the novelty that makes the sound so alarming. Keep the animal's feeding and walk schedule identical through all four days. Routine is the one anchor the nervous system can use when everything else is unpredictable.

The dhunuchi smoke is the hardest variable to mitigate. Keep owned animals away from the immediate aarti area. If a street animal shows laboured breathing or open-mouth breathing after smoke exposure, that is a veterinary emergency, not something that resolves on its own.