‘Supreme Court’s stray dogs judgment tried to solve a public health problem by declaring war on a species’, animal law expert Vivek Mukherjee notes

Vivek Mukherjee:

Let me first say what the Court actually held, because it is more careful than the reporting suggests, and one half of it is genuinely welcome. The Court said that the welfare of animals (and it used the words "the protection of sentient beings") is a matter of "undeniable constitutional, statutory and moral significance." That is the part I want everyone to hold on to. For our highest court to record, on the page, that a street dog is a sentient being and not a thing, and that its protection carries constitutional weight, is a real advance. 

In my own academic work I have spent years arguing that our law's deepest failure is that it treats sentient beings as property, as objects to be managed rather than subjects with interests of their own, and that this legal fiction is the permission structure for everything that follows. So when the Court names sentience, it is loosening, even slightly, the oldest knot in this area of law.

The difficulty is the second half of the same paragraph, where the Court says that this significance cannot be allowed to "eclipse or subordinate" the State's duty to protect human life, and that the "constitutional balance must necessarily and unequivocally tilt in favour of" human life. Now, the safe reading of that is simply this: in a genuine, irreducible, life-against-life conflict, human life prevails. With that, nobody can quarrel. The dangerous reading is to treat it as a standing rule of rank. Such reading requires Article 21 to be perceived as a trump card that automatically defeats any animal-protection statute the instant the word "safety" is spoken. My answer to "is this a dangerous precedent" is therefore: only if we accept the false premise buried inside it, that is, ‘human safety and animal welfare are opposed in the first place’. They are not. The applicants placed before the Court the settled science that sterilising and vaccinating a stable, resident dog population in place protects people better than removing it, because removal triggers the vacuum effect and draws in unvaccinated dogs. The Court itself, in paragraph 100, said that financial and logistical difficulty "cannot be permitted to operate as constitutional alibis for executive paralysis."  Our Constitution functions within a framework of harmonisation and proportionality. Following Maneka Gandhi (1978), any State procedure touching upon life and liberty must be just, fair, and reasonable, and the test for violation of the equality protection is arbitrariness. Essentially, if a measure is restricting against a protected interest, it must be done in the least harmful way. The blanket removal of dogs overlooks this possibility.

In Nagaraja (2014), the Court had noted that Article 51A(g) is the ‘magna carta’ of animal rights, and it is meant to be read in harmony with Article 21.Proportionality is so much better than a vague "tilt." After cases like Modern Dental College (2016) and Puttaswamy (2017) it is the settled way Indian courts decide when a legitimate aim may override a protected interest. 

It asks four plain questions in sequence. Is the goal legitimate? Here, public safety — yes, of course. Is the chosen measure actually suited to that goal? Will it work? Is it the least restrictive measure that achieves the goal — or is there a gentler option that does the same job? And finally, do the benefits outweigh the harm done? Blanket removal fails at the third question and fails badly, because sterilise-vaccinate-in-place achieves the same outcome with far less harm.Further, the Animal Birth Control Rules, 2023 (‘ABC Rules’) permit community dogs in residential colonies, which also house children and the elderly, but the logic of this judgment bans them from campuses and hospitals. Where is the intelligible differentia? Are the children in an apartment block less vulnerable than the students on a campus? If two situations are alike and the law treats them differently without a rational basis, that amounts to an arbitrary classification. There is also the test of arbitrariness, that evolved in the 1970s, which asks simply whether the State’s action rests on good reasons. An order that ignores the vacuum effect, the science, and the State's own feasibility data is arbitrary in that second, free-standing sense.

One may wonder why the court would go astray from its own well established principles. Alas, I would say that the reason a court reaches so easily for "human safety versus animal interest" is what I call "agnosia": a cultivated, almost trained, blindness. When a child is hurt, we see the dog with absolute clarity but we do not see the municipal neglect of waste collection, sterilisation drives and the absence of animal shelters. 

Vivek Mukherjee: The settled rule on interpretation, in India as everywhere, is that a court departs from the plain meaning of a text "only" where the words are genuinely ambiguous, or where reading them literally yields an absurdity. Where the words are clear, the court applies them, even if it dislikes the outcome. The moment a court rewrites a clear provision because it prefers a certain result, it diverges from its interpretive judicial function. Now, under Rule 11(19) of the ABC Rules, 2023, the phrase "the dogs shall be released at the same place or locality from where they were captured" is about as plain as a rule gets. It means where the dog was picked up. There is no ambiguity to resolve and no absurdity to cure. The Court's route around it was to read "locality" through the definition of "street" in Section 2(i) of the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act, 1960 and to read "gated campus" in Rule 7(2) narrowly, holding that the legislature "could not have contemplated" dogs in hospitals or schools. There are two problems with this reasoning.

First, the definition of "street" in Section 2(i) is an inclusive definition; it says "street includes" roads, lanes, passages and open spaces. It is a term that should be provided an expansive reading. Second, Rule 7(2) expressly lists "gated campus" as a category of where community dogs live. So the legislature never omitted campuses. The Court, by noting that the legislature"could not have contemplated" dogs on campuses is engaging in interpretive overreach, and overstepping into the legislature’s domain.. The line between applying a rule and rewriting it is genuinely contestable. 

Further, a beneficial or welfare legislation should be interpreted in a manner that its object is being advanced, not hindered. 

And that is the nub of my disagreement, because the ABC Rules are not an ordinary piece of delegated legislation. They provide a clear framework for population control, and the requirement of ‘same locality release’ is crucial because merely removing the resident, sterilised, vaccinated dogs from a territory without removing the food and shelter that made it a territory will only open up more unsterilised, unvaccinated dogs from the next neighbourhood to come in, and breed and fight in this new locality. So reading "locality" to stop at the campus wall engineers the very outcome the judgment is trying to prevent: more dogs, more bites, lower herd immunity. 

There is also the constitutional danger of "statutory voids". If a university or hospital can be carved out of the ABC Rules because it is a "controlled space," the same logic will be claimed next by gated colonies, then corporate parks, and then private townships. Most of the institutions in question are themselves "the State" under Article 12, which produces a constitutional oddity: the State, as Central Government, frames a rule mandating release; and the State, as a public university, argues it is exempt from that very rule. 

The cleaner course, as Senior Advocate K.K. Venugopal submitted during the hearings, is to follow the logic that if a Rule is bad, the Court should test its validity or the legislature should amend it. The Court should not read it out of existence while it remains in the statute. Either Rule 11(19) which states that the dog needs to be released at the same place or locality from where it was captured whilst recording the date and time of its release into the same is valid, in which case it must be applied as written,or it is invalid, in which case it should be declared so after a proper challenge. There is no lawful third option.

Vivek Mukherjee: 

Let me begin by saying, plainly and without reservation, that we accept the Court's logic, and we accept the condition. A claim to care for an animal in a shared space cannot be divorced from the duty to ensure that care does not endanger anyone. That principle, set out in paragraphs 71 to 74, is not an unreasonable thing for a court to insist upon. 

I want to draw attention first to what this part of the judgment quietly does well, because it is easy to miss. The Court described the NALSAR model as acting "in furtherance of the spirit of the ABC Rules," as cultivating "the inculcation of empathy among students," and as inspiring kindness "in both letter and spirit." The Court is not punishing us for acting from compassion, but has invited us to evolve a model for what responsibility can look like. 

So let me say what accountability actually means, because in our public conversation the word has curdled into a synonym for blame, and it is nothing of the sort. Mark Bovens, the Dutch academic, defines accountability as a relationship: an obligation to explain and to justify one's conduct to a forum that can ask questions and, in the end, attach consequences. Its heart is answerability, transparency, responsiveness, the willingness to stand before others and give an account. And Bovens draws a distinction I want to borrow: there is accountability as a mechanism, which is liability imposed from outside, and accountability as a virtue, which is responsibility one takes up willingly because it is right. NALSAR is choosing the second and we are volunteering to be accountable

NALSAR's first and foremost duty is to the safety and wellbeing of the people on its campus: its students, its staff, its visitors, the children who come here. That comes first, and it is non-negotiable. At the same time, the welfare of our dogs are not in tension: a stable population of nineteen sterilised, vaccinated, traceable, well-fed community dogs makes for a safer campus and we have years of  data to show it. So here is what we are doing: since the university has reopened on June 15, we  have initiated the process of hearing all our stakeholders: the students who are anxious and the students who care for the dogs, residents, staff, the administration and we will work, with patience, toward an arrangement that every party can live with. 

Scholars may debate whether conditioning a statutory permission to keep community dogs upon the surrender of ordinary fault-based protections sits comfortably with the doctrine of unconstitutional conditions — the principle that the State should not extract, as the price of a permission, a burden it could not impose directly. That is a fair academic question, and I leave it as one. As an institution, our answer is simpler: we accept the condition and intend to meet it well.

Does this reveal a deeper structural problem that an animal's interest becomes real in Indian law only when a human steps forward to absorb the risk? 

Our oppression of animals runs through the legal category of property, and genuine change will require us to renegotiate the social contract itself, so that standing is grounded not in a being's usefulness to us but in its vulnerability and its capacity to suffer. But when we are responding to a structural problem, we must look at the options available to us. We are proudly taking a stewardship to provide care and take responsibility for the strays on our campus. The National Education Policy itself speaks of empathy, humane values and ecological ethics, and we intend to execute this vision in letter and spirit.

Vivek Mukherjee: By ‘background noise’, I have meant that when a violence is repeated and routinised for long enough, our response moves from acknowledgement to numbness, the harm is pushed down into the background hum of ordinary life, and we lose the reflex to recognise new instances of it as morally serious. 

In paragraph 101 the Court called these animals sentient beings and said their protection carries "undeniable constitutional, statutory and moral significance." I want to emphasise on this portion of the ruling. For decades our law has run on the opposite premise. India's very first anti-cruelty statute, back in 1890, punished cruelty only when it occurred in a public place, which tells you that the ‘mischief’ the law cared about was whether the offence was against human sensibilities. It did not care for the animal’s pain. . Against that context, the Supreme Court noting that a dog is a sentient being is very meaningful.

But to my disappointment, the Court does not delve significantly or articulate on this sentience. There is almost no engagement anywhere in the reasoning with the dog's actual experience: the terror of capture, the disorientation of being torn from its territory, or the slow death that displacement causes for rooted, territorial animals. It also does not reckon with the documented, everyday cruelty that community dogs endure across this country in the form of poisonings, beatings, and cullings. ‘Sentience’ is only discussed in one paragraph, but there is no realisation of that principle later on.

This is exactly where I would reach for the grammar of human-rights law. We enact special, protective legislations – like the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act and the ABC Rules – for vulnerable groups who cannot defend themselves in the ordinary rough-and-tumble of majoritarian politics, like children, workers, prisoners, minorities, and, as in this case, non-human animals. The whole reason such a statute exists is that the normal play of interest will always under-protect the vulnerable, so the law lays down a floor beneath which the strong are not permitted to push them. The defining feature of interpreting such a statute is therefore a beneficiary-centred construction: you read it to advance the protection, and you resolve doubt in favour of the beneficiary. 

In this case, however, we clearly see that the interpretation actually favours the majority group. In that process, the nonhuman animal’s interest is again being relegated to ‘background noise’. 

Vivek Mukherjee: This is the most important question you have asked me. Firstly, let me give the judgment its due, because on this point it is more honest than its critics allow. In paragraph 22, the Court clearly recognised the underlying causes of the crisis and listed, in its own words, "improper disposal of food waste in and around public institutions" alongside the failure to sterilise. And in paragraphs 68 to 70 it went further, recording a pattern of "systemic administrative lapses and lethargy" extending over years, and concluding that "the difficulty lies not in the absence or inadequacy of the statutory framework, but in the failure of its effective and sustained implementation." In other words, the Court very correctly diagnosed the disease. 

Unfortunately, despite the diagnosis, its directions (Directions A to E) focus overwhelmingly on the stray dogs: identify the institutions, fence them, appoint officers to keep dogs out, inspect quarterly, and forthwith remove every dog and never return it. It only discusses waste management in a sub-clause within Direction I (which is more broadly about securing transport premises) by noting  that "proper waste-management systems shall be implemented to eliminate food sources that attract animals.”Poor waste management is the root cause of a remarkable share of urban India's afflictions, and it is simply not the fault of dogs or monkeys that our bins overflow. They are doing what any animal does near a reliable food source. As I have written before, this judgment tries to solve a public-health and sanitation problem – "waste" – by declaring war on a species. But you cannot arrest your way out of the community dog conundrum any more than you can incarcerate your way out of poverty. It requires hard work.

At NALSAR, we are trying to focus on the root problem – our campus generates roughly 660 kilograms of waste a day; our vendors push through about two lakh single-use plastic items a month; and our unsegregated, open-access bins are routinely disturbed by dogs and monkeys. So our plan is to move to four-way segregation at source; building caged, animal-proof composting for the roughly fifty-eight to sixty-five per cent of our waste that is wet and organic, so there is simply no open food to scavenge; setting up a material-recovery facility; phasing out single-use plastics; and redesigning our bins to be, literally, monkey-proof. 

About three-quarters of our waste is salvageable, and the target is to divert more than seventy per cent from landfill within a year. 

After the relocation order, the Supreme Court issued a circular requiring that all leftover food in its own premises be disposed of only in covered bins, because open food was drawing dogs into its corridors and lifts. The Court understood the causal chain perfectly well when it came to its own canteen. The logic of that circular should be applied at a national scale. There should be decentralised composting and enforcement of coverage of bins as a municipal mandate under the Solid Waste Management Rules, the ‘polluter pays principle’ should be strictly imposed against bulk waste generators, and the waste programme and ABC programme should be run as a single, connected public health system. 

Vivek Mukherjee: On the first part: yes. Capture–sterilise–vaccinate–release, done properly, is the only approach that has ever actually reduced free-roaming dog numbers and brought down dog-bite and rabies burden anywhere it has been sustained. Even the World Health Organization and the World Organisation for Animal Health, after decades of evidence, advise against culling and removal and in favour of mass sterilisation and vaccination. 

It is also the model our own Parliament chose: the ABC Rules embody CSVR, and India's National Action Plan for Dog-Mediated Rabies Elimination is built on it. However, India has implemented the model sporadically, in fragments, and without enough funding and follow-through. The judgment, and our submissions, also mentions this.

CSVR only succeeds under three conditions:

The first is a fragmented, district-by-district plan. You break a district into small, manageable units and drive each unit to roughly seventy per cent female-sterilisation coverage, the threshold at which the population stabilises and herd immunity against rabies holds. A thousand sterilisations scattered thinly across a city achieve almost nothing, while the same thousand concentrated in one ward transform it. 

The second is that this must be financed as a public-health programme. Rabies kills on the order of fifty-nine thousand people a year worldwide, the overwhelming majority from dog bites, and India carries a heavy share. The third is community ownership wherein feeders, residents and volunteers are folded in as partners rather than treated as adversaries..

As evidence of success, in Jaipur, a sustained programme run by the organisation Help in Suffering sterilised and vaccinated tens of thousands of dogs across the 1990s and 2000s, reached roughly sixty-five per cent female sterilisation, brought the population down by about twenty-eight per cent and recorded no human rabies deaths in the programme zones in the later years. 

A 2010 study of Jodhpur's dogs following an ABC programme also showed a stable decline and high vaccination coverage. In Dehradun also, a structured ABC programme reduced dog-bite incidents by over sixty-eight per cent. 

There are international examples of this, too. Bhutan became the first country on earth to sterilise and vaccinate its entire street-dog population — more than a hundred and fifty thousand dogs — using capture–neuter–vaccinate–release and, crucially, an army of trained community volunteers.  The Netherlands is effectively free of street dogs today, achieved through collect–neuter–vaccinate–return and responsible-ownership law.

Now on the second half of your question, the complete removal of dogs from institutions sits very uneasily against the simple fact that the dogs were there first. Dogs have cohabited with human settlements for roughly fifteen thousand years; many of these campuses, hospitals and stations were built around and over their home ranges. A dog is not a piece of furniture you relocate at will. Dogs are rooted to their territory the way we are rooted to home. 

To seize it and deposit it in a shelter or an unfamiliar locality is, for a territorial animal, very often a death sentence by stress, starvation, and fighting with the resident dogs of the place it is dumped into. It is both cruel and futile. Emptying out territories does not solve anything. At NALSAR, we have nineteen sterilised, vaccinated, fed community dogs who live with minimal conflict. At NLSIU, there are eighteen such dogs. 

So it is not about ‘dogs versus institutions’. If you have sterilised, vaccinated dogs, the perimeter and bans are secured and, in individual cases, dangerous animals are removed, we can have an honest balance. This is exactly what a properly funded CSVR programme can achieve. 

Vivek Mukherjee: I wish I could be optimistic, but no, on the ground, I do not believe these conditions will be applied with the rigour the judgment intends. Direction H permits euthanasia only for the rabid, the incurably ill, or the demonstrably dangerous, and only after assessment by a qualified veterinary expert, strictly within the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act and the ABC Rules. It is a tightly drawn exception, and I have no quarrel with how it reads. 

But words like "euthanasia" and "expert assessment" are sanitised, clinical words, and they often masquerade over messy violent realities. The official, the catcher, the anxious resident do not hear "a veterinarian will, after careful individual assessment, in three narrow categories, humanely end a life." They hear "the Supreme Court has allowed the killing of stray dogs." The euphemism becomes a permission slip.

We have already watched this happen in real time, so I am not speculating. Within days of the judgment, a sitting Chief Minister was reported to have described the ruling as a "free hand" to eliminate stray dogs and the Court itself had to step in and clarify that a politician's statement does not change its order. That gap, between what the judgment actually said and how that converted into popular rhetoric is the real danger. It is not something new in this litigation: each time a harsher order has gone out, the documented consequence on the ground has been a surge in poisonings, beatings and unlawful cullings. 

This is what I mean by agnosia operating at the level of language: the sanitised frame lets people do or simply look away from  things they would never countenance if the plain word – killing – were spoken aloud.  "Expert assessment" assumes a supply of qualified veterinarians and an honest, documented process. However, such a capacity is absent across vast stretches of municipal India. Thus, there is no real safeguard available and everything operates through discretion. 

Beyond all this, there is also the structural asymmetry that while the judgment protects officials acting ‘in good faith’ from registration of FIR or any coercive action taken against them in lieu of the directions issued by the Court, it puts citizens who feed community dogs under the threat of tortious liability. 

So my honest answer is that the Court has used a lot of sanitised words to mask over a cruel reality, defined by an under-resourced and under-supervised machinery, because of which in most cases its safeguards won’t work. The remedy, if there is one, is to refuse the euphemism: to insist that "euthanasia" be spoken and audited as exactly what it is, with named veterinarians, written reasons recorded for every single case, independent oversight, and real consequences for misuse.