New Delhi ? A 34-year-old man in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu married a dog on Sunday in order to try to rid himself of a curse he believed had been placed upon him for killing two dogs, local media reported.

Selva Kumar, an agricultural worker, said that when he was 18 years old, “he stoned two mating dogs to death and hung them with a rope from a nearby tree.”

Soon after the incident, Kumar told the Hindustan Times newspaper, his “legs and hands got paralyzed and I lost hearing in one ear. Only recently, after treatment, I have managed to become mobile and that, too, with a crutch.”

Desperate to live a normal life, Kumar turned to a local soothsayer, who said he was the victim of a canine curse placed on him by the dogs he had killed, and the only way to remove it was to marry a dog.