December 5, 2025
NEW DELHI – Changing public perception and recent court orders on street dogs are concerning. On 11 August 2025, the Supreme Court ordered the relocation of all street dogs in Delhi NCR to dog shelters. The order was modified on 22 August 2025; healthy and non-aggressive street dogs were to be released back to the areas from where they were picked up. Feeding street dogs in public areas was prohibited and the scope of the matter was extended beyond Delhi NCR. The modified order has been appreciated by the public as scientific since it mandates sterilisation and vaccination before release.
On 7 November 2025, the Supreme Court directed the removal of stray dogs from educational institutions, hospitals, sports complexes, bus stands and depots, and railway stations. All such animals are to be relocated to designated shelters. They should also be sterilised and vaccinated as per the Animal Birth Control Rules, 2023. Public response to this ruling has largely been critical with many calling it hasty, impractical, and potentially harmful to street dogs. However, a considerable number of people are backing this order calling it a necessary step for protecting humans. We now stand at a critical juncture where considerations of animal rights intersect with public safety concerns. At the heart of this matter is the plight of stray, street or community dogs who exist as a consequence of human actions. Dogs have undergone centuries of domestication and selective breeding which have made them dependent on human environments.
According to one research, even the cute “puppy-dog eyes” look is a product of co-evolution with humans, a trait which has selective advantage due to the nurturing human response it triggers. Dogs have shaped human society since early times as hunting partners, herders, and guardians. Ancient cultures from around the world placed dogs in high reverence and considered them the epitome of loyalty. Dogs continue to hold working roles, offering companionship or acting as guides, helping in rescue and police work or as therapy animals. Some dogs became free roaming strays mainly due to unregulated breeding, abandonment, and lack of civic infrastructure like dog shelters.
A key factor behind the recent court-mandated removal of stray dogs is an increase in dog-bite cases. According to a 2025 Press Information Bureau release, dog-bite cases in India rose from 21,89,909 in 2022 to 37,15,713 in 2024. Over the same period, reported human fatalities due to rabies increased from 21 to 54. This highlights the importance of strengthening rabies surveillance, timely post-exposure prophylaxis, and broader p ublic-health interventions. Currently, there is no way to find out if a street dog has been vaccinated which enhances the rabies threat fear. This, along with lack of awareness on post-exposure treatment, triggers anxiety and fear among many.
The humane, science-based solution is rigorous census-based sterilization and vaccination of all dogs and optimizing the public-health system. The changing perception toward street dogs calls for another important enquiry. Human communities and free-roaming street dogs have coexisted for centuries. What contemporary environmental, social or public-health shifts have led to reconsidering this established pattern of human-animal interaction? Is this due to rising human population leaving no urban space for other species? Or is it yet another indicator of shifting human-animal relationships, as evidenced by rising human-wildlife conflicts across India? Contemporary shortcomings in solid waste management provide consistent food supply for street animals.
Its inadvertent contribution to growing street-dog population needs analysis for corrective action. Each individual dog exhibits unique behavioural traits, yet in urban contexts we increasingly p erceive “dogs” as a single, homogeneous entity. In fact, a dog may be responding to a variety of circumstances like protecting its offspring, defending its territory, or expressing general pack-related behaviours. However, the fact that urban life affords us neither the time nor the attentiveness to distinguish one animal’s condition from another is itself concerning. It raises a pertinent question, are stray dogs the problem or is the need felt for their removal a symptom of a larger oncoming problem? Declining awareness of our relationship with animals is leaving us poorer in judgement; immediate removal of street dogs will create a vacuum that other species will fill resulting in unpredictable consequences. The real problem is not stray dogs b ut the lack of timely implementation of sterilization and vaccination drives.
Cities like Lucknow have shown the way by surpassing the WHO recommended benchmark for controlling rabies; these successful models must be replicated. It is not just insensitive to remove millions of dogs from their packs into dog shelters but also impractical from an operational perspective. While closed campuses may see short-term success, large multi-entry facilities like railway stations will not be able to do so. The focus should therefore be on adopting humane and scientific methods that promote coexistence and collective wisdom rather than taking a quick-fix approach.
The writers are, respectively, associate professor and a student at the Jindal School of Environment & Sustainability, O.P. Jindal Global University, Haryana, India.