India has approximately 62 million stray dogs, the largest free-roaming dog population on earth. Every year, more than 15 million Indians receive post-exposure rabies treatment, a multi-injection course that costs money rural families frequently do not have, requiring clinic visits to facilities that frequently do not stock the vaccine. India accounts for roughly 36 percent of all rabies deaths on the planet. Rabies, once symptomatic, kills with near-perfect reliability, turning the brain against itself, through confusion first, then terror, then the inability to swallow water, then death. Children die from it in disproportionate numbers because they are shorter, slower, and exist at dog-eye level.
Priya Sharma was seven years old and running the way children run, toward nothing, toward everything, the way joy moves before it learns to be careful. It was January 2023, early morning in Sitapur, Uttar Pradesh. A pack of strays caught her in an open field. She did not come home. Her mother, Sunita, told reporters: “I thought she’d come back after playing.” Priya was one of sixteen children killed by stray dogs in that district within a single year. Sixteen children. One district. Twelve months. The number does not ask to be interpreted. It asks to be answered.
A policy built on surface logic and hollow results
In 2001, the Indian government banned the culling of stray dogs. In its place came the Animal Birth Control programme, known as ABC. Dogs are caught, sterilised, vaccinated against rabies, and returned to the streets. The policy has surface logic: reduce the population over time, interrupt rabies transmission, reduce human-animal conflict. What it has never had is results.
- Municipalities lack the funding and infrastructure to operate ABC at the scale the problem demands
- The sterilised dog returns to its territory, to its pack, to the same lane where it was caught
- The stray population has not declined since the ban; in most cities it has grown
- The bites have not stopped
- The deaths have not stopped
The policy has calcified into something beyond question, protected not by evidence of its working but by the organised ferocity of those who benefit from its continuation.
Power dressed as compassion
Animal welfare organisations in India wield political influence that is, in a country of this scale and complexity, extraordinary. They have challenged culling attempts in court with consistent success. They have reframed every public conversation about stray dogs as a referendum on human decency toward animals. They have made the word “cull” sound like a moral crime rather than a public health instrument that every country which eliminated rabies has used.
Their victories accumulate in courtrooms and newspaper columns. The losses accumulate in Sitapur, in Nagpur, in the streets of Hyderabad, where in 2023 a woman named Pallavi was dragged off her scooter and mauled by a pack at five in the morning, in the lanes of every city in this country where the poorest residents have learned, with the particular resignation of people who know no one is coming, to simply live with the fear.
The suffering falls on the same people, always
The debate permits suffering that almost always belongs to the same people. Consider who actually lives without protection.
- A child in a gated apartment complex in South Mumbai has a watchman, a gate, a car, and the luxury of finding stray dogs charming from a distance
- The child walking to a municipal school in Govandi does not
- The ragpicker moving through Kolkata’s northern margins before dawn does not
- The daily wage worker sleeping on an open construction site in Gurugram does not
These people live at ground level, in the same geography as the dogs, without protection and without political representation. When they are bitten, they may not complete the vaccine series because they cannot miss three more days of work. When their children are killed, they do not have lawyers. They do not have press contacts. They have grief, a government form, and the faint hope that someone will eventually care enough to count them.
The animal welfare lobby has made one word unspeakable in this conversation: hierarchy. Not hierarchy as a licence for cruelty, but the hierarchy that any moral framework worthy of the name must be able to state clearly: that when the safety of a human child and the life of a feral dog come into direct and irreconcilable conflict, the child comes first. Every time. Without negotiation and without apology.
The deliberate blurring of this hierarchy is not a compassionate position. It is a class position. It is a choice made by people who do not live with the consequences, imposed on people who have no say in the matter, and then wrapped in the language of kindness so that it cannot be easily challenged. That is not ethics. That is power.
What the rest of the world actually did
Rabies has been eliminated from Western Europe, North America, Australia, Japan, and most of Latin America. Not one of them got there through sterilisation and return.
- London eliminated its stray dog problem in the nineteenth century through mandatory registration, strict ownership laws, and the systematic removal of unowned animals from public space, through sheltering where possible and euthanasia where necessary. By the early twentieth century, the street dog was gone from British cities. Rabies followed.
- Japan, in 1950, had over 800,000 strays and a rabies crisis. A national programme of removal, vaccination of owned dogs, and aggressive public education brought both numbers to effective zero within two decades.
- The Netherlands declared itself stray-free in 2016, through investment in shelters, mass adoption campaigns, free sterilisation for owned animals, and the removal of unowned ones.
Japan has one of the world’s most sophisticated animal welfare cultures. Germany has stronger legal protections for animals than most countries. Not a single country on that list achieved a humane outcome for animals by leaving feral dogs on the street. They achieved it by accepting that the street is not a home, that a dog without an owner is not living freely but suffering in public, and that the only honest response to that suffering is to end it, one way or another.
India is not short of love for animals. It is short of the political will to make a decision that will anger a vocal, organised, largely upper-middle-class constituency. That is the whole story. Everything else is commentary.
A structure, not an accident
The Supreme Court has tried to hold two irreconcilable truths simultaneously: that residents have a right to safety, and that the ABC policy must continue. It has produced a ruling that resolves nothing and satisfies no one. The Animal Welfare Board has more institutional leverage over this question than the municipal bodies responsible for keeping streets safe. The policy that has failed for twenty years remains legally untouchable.
In this paralysis, which is not an accident but a structure, the deaths continue with the regularity of something that has been accepted. Accepted is the honest word. Not tolerated. Not lamented. Accepted, which is what tolerance becomes once it stops being examined.
What Sunita understood and no one will say to her face
Sunita still lives in Sitapur. Her other children do not play outside the way children should, with the unselfconscious, directionless running that Priya was doing when the dogs found her. She filed a complaint after her daughter’s death. Nothing happened. She said she did not understand how this was allowed.
She was right not to understand, because the answer is not complicated. It is simply one that the people responsible have decided not to say in a room where she might hear it.
Her daughter’s life was placed on one side of a scale, and a policy was placed on the other, and the policy was judged to be worth more. That judgment was made by people who do not live in Sitapur, will never live in Sitapur, and have arranged the law so that the people of Sitapur cannot effectively challenge it. The language of animal compassion has been used, with great sophistication and no self-awareness, to make a particular cruelty invisible: the cruelty of deciding that some lives are worth protecting and others are worth sacrificing, and then writing the decision up as kindness.
The dogs did not choose to be born feral into streets that cannot sustain them. The system produced them and then produced a policy to ensure they stayed there. Priya Sharma did not choose to run across that field on that January morning. She was seven years old. She was running because she was alive and it was morning and she did not know yet that the city had already decided she was on her own.
A tragedy is what happens when fate cannot be avoided. This was a policy. The people who wrote it, defended it, and continue to defend it in courtrooms and opinion pages while Sitapur buries its children know exactly what they have done. They are counting on the rest of us to keep looking away.
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