Don’t Let The Dogs Out

On June 30, a news report detailed a case of six-year-old Chhavi Sharma from Rohini, Delhi, who developed rabies after being bitten by a stray dog. She died in late July. The incident provoked anger in her neighbourhood and renewed criticism of how the city’s municipal bodies respond to dog-bite complaints.

On August 11, the Supreme Court took suo motu cognisance of the case. A bench of Justices JB Pardiwala and R Mahadevan directed municipal authorities in Delhi-NCR to remove community dogs from residential areas “at the earliest” and relocate them to shelters. The order sparked immediate protests from animal rights groups and community feeders. A wider debate followed: whether the judges were addressing a pressing public health concern or whether they had issued a directive that Delhi was unprepared to carry out.

When lawyers mentioned the matter the next day before the Chief Justice of India, BR Gavai, he said, “I will look into it.” The CJI then constituted a three-judge bench to hear the case. On August 14, a larger bench comprising Justice Vikram Nath, Justice Sandeep Mehta and Justice NV Anjaria heard petitioners plead for the city’s community dogs, pointing out that the issue was not only about their relocation. “The question is, has the municipal corporation built shelter homes? Now dogs are being picked up. This needs to be argued in depth. Let the suo motu order be stayed,” senior advocate Kapil Sibal said. The bench reserved its interim order.

The August 11 directive to capture, sterilise, vaccinate and house community dogs in shelters still stands. It was framed, the judges said, “for public safety,” keeping in mind that visually impaired persons, the elderly and children were “vulnerable” to dog bites and subsequent diseases like rabies.

The court’s order shows that dog bites across India have increased substantially in the last three years, going from 6,600+ in 2022 to 25,000+ in 2024. The bench questioned whether animals have fundamental rights such as the right to life, and further said that the Animal Birth Control Rules (ABC Rules) had clearly failed in controlling the dog population in the capital city. However, animal activists say it is not the rules that are the problem but the MCD’s own inefficiency and corruption. They point out that Delhi itself does not have enough shelters that are certified under the ABC Rules and lacks trained staff and transparent procedures to execute such a large-scale operation humanely.

While the MCD runs 20 sterilisation centres alongside NGOs, Ambika Shukla, a board member of People for Animals (PFA), says: “They (MCD) do not have a single shelter. There is not one municipal shelter in Delhi.” She points out that the apex court explicitly requires municipal, not private, shelters. This distinction matters for oversight and long-term welfare.

MCD sterilisation centres are built around the ABC Rules catch-sterilise-vaccinate-release policy. Shukla points out that they can hold dogs only briefly, “10 days on average,” before releasing them back to their area. Thus, in practice, Delhi’s ABC centres are temporary kennels at best.

Shukla says that even the shelters are “given to former MCD officials to run,” and they “make a sort of business out of it rather than care for the dogs.” She recalls an incident during the Delhi floods of 2023 when her volunteers found that owners of a known shelter at Bela Road in Civil Lines had left many dogs to drown in locked cages while reaching safety themselves. “We even asked them when we rescued them if there were any more dogs in the shelter, and they said no,” she recalls, adding that only later, when volunteers went down to the flooded shelter, did they find the canines, some drowned, “locked up in cages with water levels well above their heads.”

We were not able to independently verify this, though a volunteer confirmed that they were among those who swam to rescue the dogs. “They need to be blacklisted, but they have not been,” she says, stressing that transparency was essential to humane practices: “As a responsible municipal organisation, it would only be fair for MCD to explain the mechanics of what they are doing. These are the arrangements we have made. The public is free to come and see.”

Officials insist that sterilisation and vaccination drives have expanded in recent years and that municipal apps and GPS tools exist to record pick-ups. However, a former MCD official said most dogs that are caught are “released wherever they can be; no one is releasing them back into their original area, which is mandated by the ABC Rules.” He added that, “without shelters, the dogs would most likely be thrown into a nearby jungle where no one can see them.”

The problem of stray dogs is not unique to India. Several developing countries struggle to control their community animal population. However, across the world, the ABC-prescribed catch-vaccinate-sterilise/neuter-release strategy (CNVR) has worked. In Phuket, Thailand used CNVR and vaccination campaigns with NGOs to cut rabies risk. By 2025, human rabies was nearly eliminated. Bhutan too achieved similar results in two years.

“One needs to have a sterilisation that is focused area-wise so that you achieve a high percentage of coverage. Second, a mass revaccination programme, where you are doing that annually and revaccinating the dogs against rabies, which WHO says should be 70 per cent. The third thing is a good education and awareness initiative,” says Abodh Aras of Welfare of Stray Dogs. Though MCD officials claim roughly 700,000 dogs have been sterilised over seven years, activists dispute even those numbers. Justice Nath on August 14 also pulled up the MCD, stating that the civic body had to take accountability for the growing stray population.

Annanya Nautiyal, founder of Pawsana, an indie dog adoption agency, says: “Most are paying out of their own pocket to get their community dogs vaccinated and sterilised because the MCD has a budget of Rs 2,000 per dog, which is not only insufficient but also results in these dogs being released while they are still recovering." Studies show sterilising female dogs effectively reduces street populations. Delhi’s MCD has lagged, with a 2016 South Delhi survey finding only 28 per cent of dogs sterilised amid no full census.

Canine behaviour experts point out that the SC directive could be based on a false narrative. “What is the data they are using?” asks Surabhi Venkateshwar, a canine behaviour consultant with a diploma in canine biosocial psychology and ethology. “What are we defining as ferocity? How are we measuring it?” She points out that media coverage often amplifies isolated incidents into a larger public panic.

Venkateshwar says dog aggression is rarely spontaneous, often triggered by unmet needs or chronic stress and adds that MCD relocations disorient dogs, forcing survival struggles in unfamiliar territories and hostile packs, worsening aggression risks. That is precisely why the ABC rules and long-standing best practice across the world mandate CNVR in the same area. Shukla too argued that when municipal teams fail to return dogs to their territories, the very problem the court sought to solve worsens. Incident-by-incident examinations should be done to draw operational lessons rather than succumb to blanket policies, Venkateshwar states.

A study by Krithika Srinivasan, professor of Political Ecology at Edinburgh, found that 82 per cent of interactions between humans and street dogs were actually peaceful. That baseline, Venkateshwar says, should be used to temper both alarmist rhetoric and punitive policies. She points out that rabies is a preventable medical problem and is distinct from biting incidents, many of which are provoked or context-specific. “Rabies is still an easier solution to solve,” she says, because vaccine campaigns paired with sterilisation have proven effective in places that have implemented them comprehensively. By contrast, she says reducing bite incidents would require attention to human behaviour, waste management and the relationships between feeders, communities and animals.

Nautiyal alleged that municipal teams had already begun picking up dogs in certain localities without clear public information. “I am getting calls that vans are coming in the middle of the night and dogs are going missing. But there is no word from the MCD,” she says.

Avantika Mehta is a senior associate editor based in New Delhi

This article appeared in Outlook Magazine's 01 September 2025 issue, The Tariff Weapon, as ‘Don't Let The Dogs Out'