Dogs astray in Bangalore often wind up in small concrete-and-wire cages, but stray humans can do even worse.
Down a muddy, rutted lane from the dogcatchers' pound, Maliga Veermuthu and her five children have ended up in a corrugated-metal shed, measuring six by 12 metres, a dark and stifling 'home' they share, intimately, with other slum-dwellers - 20 families in all, each with the living space of five dogs.
'When it comes to the way we live, you aren't going to find much difference between humans and the animals up there,' the middle-aged widow said bitterly. Sometime in the next few years, around the end of the century, it will become the life most of us lead: Projections say more than half of humanity will be residents of cities, those centres of commerce and squalor where, 100 years ago, only one person in 40 lived.
Explosive growth has transformed Bangalore. In the past 10 years, its population has expanded by 1.6 million people - and now tops five million.
But the urbanisation of the planet can be seen far beyond southern India, in the teeming hillside slums of Rio de Janeiro and the endless dry-lake shantytowns of Mexico City, in the bursting seams of Nairobi and the bamboo barrios of Manila.
It shows up in the air pollution, water shortages, disease and crime that have afflicted Third World metropolises as they absorbed four out of five of the 1.2 billion city-dwellers added to the world's population since 1970.
During much of that time, Arcot Ramachandran ran the United Nations Centre on Human Settlements in Nairobi, Kenya. Today, semi-retired in Bangalore, he believes things will get worse before they get better.