The Supreme Court, on August 11, calling the capital’s stray dog situation “extremely grim,” had ordered every free-roaming canine in Delhi-NCR to be picked
up and permanently relocated to shelters. No more packs of skinny, tail-wagging strays weaving between parked cars. No more watchful eyes from under tea stalls.
The justices rejected India’s long-standing Animal Birth Control (ABC) rule — which requires that sterilised and vaccinated dogs be returned to their original territories — calling it “absurd.”
The order was sweeping: 5,000 to 6,000 dogs to be housed within eight weeks, with no animal released back. On paper, it promised a bite-free city. In reality, it set Delhi on a path that other cities — both in India and abroad — have already walked, and found wanting.
“Five thousand dogs? That’s nothing,” Maneka Gandhi, BJP leader and long-time animal rights activist, told CNBC-TV18's Parikshit Luthra. “Delhi has three lakh dogs. To house them, you’d need 3,000 shelters, 1.5 lakh staff, 500 vans. Food alone will cost ₹5 crore a week. The total? ₹15,000 crore.”
Delhi wouldn’t be the first Indian city to take on its stray population in an organised way. In March 2025, the Hindustan Times reported, Prayagraj had sterilised and vaccinated 16,334 dogs in 18 months. The law allows only 70-75% of the street dog population to be sterilised, and each animal must be returned to its capture site.
Civic officials said the approach was working — aggression and bite incidents were down.
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Even in countries with deeper pockets, large-scale dog relocation has strained budgets and facilities beyond capacity. In Turkey, a 2024 law ordering the removal of all strays ran headlong into a reality check: Municipal shelters could hold only 105,000 dogs in a country with an estimated four million. Reports of neglect and euthanasia soon followed.
In Bucharest, Romania, a culling and sheltering campaign in 2013 saw tens of thousands of dogs captured after high-profile bite incidents. International NGOs reported that while some public bite complaints initially dropped, shelter overcrowding, poor conditions, and rapid population replacement from rural inflows meant the stray numbers rebounded within a few years.
Thailand’s Bangkok metropolitan area tried a similar “round-up” in 2003. Thousands of dogs were sent to government shelters far from the city. Reports from the World Society for the Protection of Animals noted that many dogs died from disease and malnutrition in the crowded facilities. Without parallel sterilisation, the city saw a steady return of stray populations.
In Brazil, the city of Sao Paulo shifted from capture-and-kill to sheltering in the late 1990s after public backlash. But a decade later, a government audit found most shelters operating above capacity, with adoption rates too low to offset intake.
Inside the shelter reality
For a ground-level view of what it actually takes to care for dogs in confinement, the experience of Niall Harbison is instructive. On Thailand’s Koh Samui island, home to thousands of strays, Harbison runs a small sterilisation and sanctuary project. His facility has just 10 kennels on an acre of donated land, yet even with this limited capacity, each new intake demands a complex process — quarantine, testing for contagious illnesses such as canine parvovirus, vaccination, antibiotic treatment, and socialisation to improve adoption chances.
Harbison feeds about 100 street dogs daily and works with local vets to sterilise and vaccinate them before releasing them back to their territories. He is “loath to gather up dogs” into shelters because the island already has 300 in confinement, and adding more would strain care standards and worsen disease risk. “Rescuing without changing hearts and minds is like sticking a plaster on a heart attack,” he told The Guardian in 2023.
Animal shelter medicine is blunt about overcrowding: It breeds disease. Parvovirus, distemper, mange, kennel cough — outbreaks spread like wildfire when stressed, immuno-compromised animals are crammed together. In Delhi’s heat, where temperatures routinely top 40 degrees, maintaining sanitation and biosecurity for tens of thousands of dogs would be a logistical nightmare.
Robin Singh, founder of Peepal Farm, doesn’t mince words. “They’re going to try this haphazardly,” he told CNBC-TV18's Parikshit Luthra. “Some dogs will be relocated, some killed. And they’ll all be replaced — by unvaccinated, unsterilised dogs from surrounding areas. The problem will get worse.”
The vacuum effect
What Singh is describing has a name: The ‘vacuum effect.’ Remove dogs from a territory and others — often younger, unvaccinated, and more aggressive — move in. The International Companion Animal Management (ICAM) Coalition and the WHO have documented this rebound across continents.
Gandhi has seen it firsthand. “A relocated dog doesn’t know the new area, doesn’t know where food is, and faces hostility from local dogs and humans. It will bite — and it will bite the most vulnerable — children, the elderly, women.”
Bali’s 2008 rabies outbreak offers a stark example. Culling to stop the spread prompted owners to move dogs to “safe” areas, inadvertently carrying the virus into new territories.
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What the evidence says
A 2019 study titled, ‘The Effectiveness of Dog Population Management: A Systematic Review,’ noted that sheltering alone barely dents population numbers. Sterilisation — particularly when it reaches 70% coverage — outperforms every other method, cutting numbers by up to 75% over 20 years. Culling achieves just 13%.
Singh worries Delhi’s order will undo the gains ABC has made. “The ABC rules are science-backed. Relocation breaks what’s been working, and there will be more health issues, not fewer.”
A different blueprint
If Delhi wants proof that the alternative works, it could look to Bhutan. In 2009, the Himalayan kingdom launched a nationwide trap-neuter-vaccinate-return (TNVR) programme. Teams sterilised and vaccinated street dogs, trained local vets, tracked populations, and educated communities. Within a decade, human rabies deaths dropped to zero, and street dog numbers stabilised.
Gandhi believes Delhi could replicate this success — if it fixes the corruption and inefficiency that have plagued its ABC programme. “Lucknow has one ABC centre and no bite cases. Delhi has 20 centres, some falling apart, and no monitoring. Fix them, run them professionally, and the problem will go away in two years.”
Beyond the dogs
Mass removal could also reshape Delhi in unexpected ways. “The minute you remove dogs, monkeys will come down,” Gandhi warns. Police, she adds, are trained to treat sudden dog poisonings as a sign of an impending robbery; without dogs as an early-warning system, crime patterns could shift.
And then there’s the human bond. For many, street dogs are companions, guardians, and part of the social fabric. Removing them en masse would not just change the streetscape — it would change daily life.
The real middle path
Both Gandhi and Singh insist the way forward is not to “empty” the streets, but to make them safer. That means:
- Upgrading and monitoring sterilisation centres.
- Ending relocation of healthy, sterilised dogs.
- Enforcing waste management to cut food sources.
- Cracking down on illegal breeding centres and pet shops.
- Recognising feeders as partners in vaccination and care.
The WHO, OIE, and decades of field data back them up: High-coverage sterilisation and vaccination is the fastest, most humane route to fewer bites and fewer dogs.
“People who are happy that dogs will be locked up will be happy for 48 hours,” Gandhi said. “Then they’ll face the next 300,000 dogs. We want the same as them: Fewer dogs, no biting. But this is not the way.”
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