Is it a dog’s life?

While dealing with strays we need to be more rational and less emotional

Alok Tiwari

When people talk of living a dog’s life, they are probably unaware of the status the canines enjoy in India. First, it took an order by Supreme Court to shake the authorities into action about them. Last week the court ordered capturing and impounding of all stray dogs in the National Capital Region. Such was the anger of the judges that they barred anyone from interfering. This expectedly led to protests by animal rights activists across the country. They had such an impact that the chief justice assigned the case to a larger three-judge bench for reconsideration. The dogs thus got more “due process” and “natural justice” than what even citizens often get from the judicial system.

Stray dogs are a massive and growing problem not just in and around Delhi but all over India. Every big city has lakhs of them. Dog bites are estimated to cause thousands of deaths every year. Even if a person does not die, a dog attack at the minimum entails expensive rabies shots and treatment for wounds. The trauma can last a lifetime. The victims are mostly children or old people. Dogs chasing vehicles can startle the driver and cause road accidents, sometimes fatal. Packs howling away in the night cause sleep deprivation and can be extremely unnerving. It also provokes barking by pets at home adding to the cacophony.

This was not always so. Stray dogs have always been around, but their out-of-control numbers are a relatively recent phenomenon. Decades ago, it was common sight to see municipal dog catching vans roam the localities rounding up the strays. Back then they would even administer poison to the dogs and come a couple of hours later to collect the carcasses. Then we started applying first world values to the third world situation. Activists demanded this cruel practice to manage population be stopped. Several court orders and laws followed that banned catching and euthanizing dogs. A burst of love for dogs also led to several people in every locality going around feeding them while accepting no responsibility for their act.

Protection plus food equals population explosion for any animal. Bingo, we gave ourselves an entirely preventable problem! Not that dog lovers are insensitive to the trouble caused by the strays. Their solution is animal birth control (ABC). Catch the strays, sterilize them, and release them back in the same area. To help the cause, animal rights organizations themselves got into the business of ABC. This was an expensive solution but should, in theory, have brought the stray population down within a few years.

But then two things happened, Most civic bodies did not have the money needed to carry out sterilizations at the scale needed. Also, there was corruption in the ABC programmes. The strays were rounded up and released without being sterilized and the civic body billed. The result: crores spent but menace continued to grow.

Clearly, something is very amiss. Irrationally according special status to an animal almost always spells trouble. Just a few years back we implemented a complete ban on cow slaughter in many parts of the country. This led to rise of stray cattle populations that have themselves become a problem, especially in Uttar Pradesh. Resources that could have been better utilized elsewhere are being used to deal with the consequences. Something similar is happening with pigeons in many cities, including Mumbai. One community is insisting its beliefs are above the health and hygiene concerns of everyone else.

Dogs too have been accorded a God-like status. Hardcore dog lovers would not hear a word about even rounding them up, let alone euthanizing them, no matter how much misery they inflict on humans. Lawmakers and courts often side with them to be in tune with modern values. I love dogs myself and am against unnecessary animal cruelty. But I find opposition to humanely euthanizing dogs by the people who would happily feed chicken and mutton to them hypocritical. Millions of animals like chicken, fish, goats, and pigs are slaughtered daily for food. We see chicken being raised in the cruellest manner in industrial-scale poultry farms and then transported and stored in unspeakable conditions. All this is tolerated without a whimper. The Animal Welfare Board remains untroubled.

Population of entire species have plummeted as we have diverted their habitats to build our homes, factories, airports, and highways. If you live in a modern home, drive a car, take trains or flights you have already inflicted and continue to inflict untold cruelty on other species. So please stop being a saint about dogs. Let authorities do whatever needs to be done to keep humans safe. This is not to suggest we start being cruel to dogs as well. Just accept that there may be situations when we need to reduce their numbers by culling them. Do it as humanely as possible but do it.

It is argued dogs are special because they can experience emotions and pain. Though it is irrelevant to the act of inflicting cruelty, I submit so can pigs and goats. There are no marches against them being slaughtered. And we assume nothing needs to be done about chicken and fish just because they have smaller bodies and brains and cannot wag tails for us. It is time to get rational about the whole situation.

Animals must be protected if they are an endangered species or have a critical ecological role to play. Cruelty must be avoided but human life should have top priority. Stray dog numbers have reached such levels that impounding all of them is not realistically possible. ABC efforts have repeatedly failed. We are permitting culling of wild animals like nilgais and wild boars. We shoot down or capture even tigers if they go rogue. It makes no sense to spare just the dogs, considering the damage they do.

This column was published in Lokmat Times on Aug 21, 2025