Deal with community dogs in a scientific way
This article is authored by Ambika Shukla, trustee, People For Animals, India’s largest animal welfare organisation, New Delhi.
The Supreme Court’s latest order — directing that every educational institution, hospital, sports complex, bus stand, railway station, and public facility be fenced off and that community dogs picked up from these spaces not be released back — represents a departure from the scientific foundations of the Animal Birth Control (ABC) Rules, 2023 and a misreading of administrative reality. India has over 62 million community dogs. Even if a fraction inhabits such spaces, implementing this order would require hundreds of thousands of fenced zones, tens of thousands of new shelters, and massive coordination across local bodies already struggling to meet basic sterilisation and vaccination targets. It is logistically impossible, financially unviable, and risks collapsing existing animal-birth-control infrastructure that is already under strain.
Equally worrying is the absence of scientific reasoning behind the directive. The ABC Rules, framed under the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act 1960, mandate a sterilise–vaccinate–release model precisely because global and national data show that relocation destabilises canine populations, increases migration, and heightens rabies risk. The order’s prohibition on returning sterilised dogs to their territories directly contradicts Rule 10 of the ABC Rules and decades of epidemiological consensus endorsed by the World Health Organization and the World Organisation for Animal Health. Confinement or mass housing is not management. Without reliable data on population, bite incidence, vaccination coverage, or shelter capacity, such a measure amounts to policymaking in the dark. This is probably the very first apex court order where the footnotes quote only media reports. No scientific study, no expert opinion, no research papers, no medical or municipal data.
The way forward is through implementation discipline. The PCA Act, the ABC Rules, and the AWBI guidelines already provide a lawful, humane, and scientifically validated framework. What India needs is enforcement. Municipal authorities, NGOs, and citizen feeders must function as partners, not adversaries, because public health and animal welfare are interdependent. If the goal is safety, then the focus must be on proper waste management, fencing where essential, mass sterilisation and vaccination, and transparent, data-driven monitoring — not mass relocation. Only evidence-based, humane action will deliver results. Policy without science is chaos — and chaos, in this case, will affect both human and animal lives.
This article is authored by Ambika Shukla, trustee, People For Animals, India’s largest animal welfare organisation, New Delhi.
