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As hundreds of thousands of dogs ranged as usual around the back streets of India’s capital on Tuesday morning, it was the city’s humans, dog lovers in particular, who were howling.
On Monday, the Supreme Court of India, with its offices in the center of New Delhi, ruled that the current legal practices for taking care of the city’s stray dog population were inadequate. Within eight weeks, the court declared, all strays must be rounded up and detained permanently in shelters.
The judges were responding to the menace of dogs that form packs and attack people. There has been a rash of incidents in recent years in which children have been mauled and in some cases killed by feral dogs. A 6-year-old girl died of rabies in July, setting in motion a train of grief and outrage that led to the Supreme Court. The justices took up the issue without any formal petition, as it does sometimes for matters of public interest.
The court’s order seemed to contradict the Animal Birth Control law, which requires strays to be vaccinated, sterilized and then returned to the places where they had been picked up. But that strategy has not worked, the court found.
“For the time being, forget the rules and face reality,” a judge on the bench said, as reported by Indian news outlets. The court added that anyone who obstructed or interfered with its order would be held in contempt.
Nishaank Mattoo, a lawyer who has argued cases at the Supreme Court and who says he is a dog lover himself, said the judgment was wrong. “The law says that you cannot displace a dog unless it is suffering from rabies,” he noted. “And even if you remove it to sterilize it, you need to put it back in its surroundings.”
Complying with the court’s decision will not be easy for the New Delhi authorities. Yasin Hussain, a veterinarian in the city, called it “an ill-thought-out and arbitrary order.”
The action proposed by the Supreme Court would require that the city’s free-roaming dogs, which are estimated to number as many as a million, be placed in facilities that even the justices acknowledge are yet to be built and that would need hefty funding to staff and operate.
“How is it possible to build so many shelters in so short a time?” Dr. Hussain asked. Others expressed related concerns. Antra Khurana, an academic who keeps rescue dogs in her home, said, “How can the court ask these gentle creatures to be dumped in such large numbers?”
By Tuesday, even the political opposition had something to say. Rahul Gandhi, a leader of the Congress Party, wrote on social media, “These voiceless souls are not ‘problems’ to be erased.”
While the court’s language and relatively short deadline for compliance were unusual, its interventions into the mundane affairs of life in the capital are not. For instance, it was the Supreme Court, not lawmakers, that forced New Delhi’s fleet of buses and auto-rickshaws to convert from diesel and gasoline to compressed natural gas 25 years ago, and this week the justices ruled on how to remove older diesel vehicles from the city’s roads.
This time, “the Supreme Court has ventured into the realm of legislation, which is not within its scope of powers,” Mr. Mattoo said, referring to the justices’ creating policy rather than just interpreting and applying existing laws.
Even the term “stray dogs” muddles an already complex issue. In Indian cities, many residents involve themselves in looking after animals that are neither pets nor possessions. Cows, pigeons and monkeys are routinely fed and befriended by neighbors.
Many of the same animals can be pests. In a country where rabies is a significant threat, anyone bitten must race to the emergency room for injections. Despite that risk, the loudest response to the court order has come from those defending the strays who loiter around their neighborhoods.
In Bengaluru, a giant city in India’s south, a group of dog lovers was organizing over social media on Tuesday morning, saying they wanted to present a “united stand against the removal and harm of community dogs,” even though the Supreme Court order currently applies only to New Delhi.
Alex Travelli is a correspondent based in New Delhi, writing about business and economic developments in India and the rest of South Asia.
Suhasini Raj is a reporter based in New Delhi who has covered India for The Times since 2014.
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