‘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
Speaking to The Leaflet, Vivek Mukherjee of NALSAR’s Animal Law Centre, which intervened in the Supreme Court’s stray dogs case, analyses the judgment’s dual nature: its ability to diagnose the right problem, waste, and its inability to see how emptying out dogs from their territories resolves nothing.
Published on: 1 July 2026, 08:19 am
IN MAY 2026, the Supreme Court in a much anticipated ruling in the suo moto case on stray dogs had given a nod to the complete removal of strays from institutional spaces like schools, hospitals, and railway stations. It also ordered for them to be relocated to shelters and explicitly barred them from being released into the same locations after they were sterilised and vaccinated.
The judgement delved significantly on how increasing incidents of dog bites affected the right to life under Article 21 of the Constitution. NALSAR University of Law, Hyderabad, played a crucial role as it staunchly advocated against the removal of dogs from public institutions by showcasing its own model run by the Animal Law Centre of NALSAR which is premised on sterilisation based care of the dogs with proper documentation and sensitisation of its students and staff.
Last week, The Leaflet posed some queries to Professor Vivek Mukherjee, the faculty coordinator at NALSAR’s Animal Law Centre, who has worked extensively on issues on animal law and environmental law. Professor Mukherjee provided some critical insights on how the Court’s May ruling can be contextualised against the larger landscape of animal rights jurisprudence and the efficacy of the already existing Capture-Sterilize-Vaccinate -Release (‘CSVR’) model as opposed to the modality of relocation of strays which was opted by the courts along with a pragmatic glimpse of the actual implementation of the ruling on the ground.
Ananya Gunjan: The Supreme Court has held that the State's obligation to protect life and safety under Article 21 prevails over ordinary statutory animal welfare regulations, and that the balance must tilt in favour of preserving human life and safety. Do you think this creates a dangerous precedent where human rights can routinely override animal welfare legislation?
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.