Dogs down. Doggone dilemma. Dog Dog-ma. Dogged Dogfight. Dogs Docked. Dogs in the Dog House. And best of all, ‘Dog House to end Doggone Dilemma’ (Times Now). Huh?
These are some of the punny-but-not-so-funny headlines used by television news channels to describe the Supreme Court order on transferring Delhi’s entire population of stray dogs to dog pounds within eight weeks.
“Impossible,” said animal rights advocate Maneka Gandhi to Times Now, “namumkin”.
“Disastrous decision,” added Ambika Shukla, Maneka’s sister and animal welfare activist, “Correct decision,” disagreed a lady living in a gated community of Noida (News 18 India).
“Fear mongering,” insisted Shukla on NDTV 24×7.
“Excellent judgment,” said another lady from Noida (Aaj Tak).
“Very wrong of Supreme Court,” countered a protester against the SC verdict, at Delhi’s India Gate (Aaj Tak), “Everyone has sold out.”
Maybe we ought to leave the last word to another outraged protester who told Times Now, tartly,“(MCD) can’t run government hospitals – (they) will run shelter homes for dogs?’’
Credit for SC verdict goes to…
Monday’s decision by a two-judge bench of the Supreme Court became the hottest news of the week. Different sections of the news media have been divided over the verdict—reflecting the differences of opinion among the capital’s population. Or at least those interviewed by some news media organisations.
The SC verdict was the lead story in TV news and in newspapers like The Times of India and The Indian Express on Tuesday. The local pages of these and other newspapers have been full of reactions to the SC ruling—and its feasibility on the ground.
The Hindu and The Indian Express wrote editorials on the issue: In ‘The Court Strays’, the Express said it’s “a tough ask” for a city with eight lakh stray dogs and worried that it “may have stoked many more fires than it extinguished”.
In ‘Dogs and laws’, The Hindu supported the verdict for “its willingness to override administrative lethargy” but cautioned that without proper infrastructural support, “Delhi risks swapping its dog menace with underfunded canine slammers at the city’s edge.”
News channels were also in two minds about removing stray dogs to the government dog pounds. Take the case of NDTV and CNN-News 18. While NDTV has been campaigning against the ‘stray dog menace’ in Delhi and claimed a decisive role in the SC verdict— ‘NDTV Impact’, it crowed—CNN News 18 questioned the SC’s ‘controversial order’. One anchor said this was “completely against the law of the land…and its own previous judgments.”
By the way, The Times of India also claimed victory in the SC verdict, in ‘Remove all stray dogs…’ (12 August), writing that the court was “acting on a TOI report.”
Most television news channels like India Today, Times Now, and Republic TV have expressed their concern by repeatedly using words like ‘menace’ in their headlines. NDTV 24 x 7 called it “urban menace”. ‘Biting terror’ is how Times Now put it. On Republic TV, Arnab Goswami said, the stray dogs were “killing, attacking, biting …. (in) terrible, terrible attacks.’’
Anti-canine representation
Most news channels did give space to animal activists, and interviewed “dog lovers” in news capsules or their evening debates.
However, the images of dogs used during such telecasts were frightening—even a passionate lover of dogs would run in the opposite direction.
An example is Times Now Navbharat (TNNB): In its show, ‘News ki Paathshaala’, it featured an image of two ferocious hounds, baring their teeth, snarling terrifyingly.
TV news channels also repeatedly telecast mobile grabs or CCTV footage of dogs attacking people, including children. NDTV India went so far as to show a video in five steps, where a dog bites the very man who tried to save it from being beaten up by someone else. Moral of the story? Dogs bite indiscriminately, even their protectors.
DD News was one of the few channels to feature the image of two benign-looking dogs.
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Cost of sheltering dogs
Protesters against the SC ruling and animal activists on TV shows pointed out how impossible it was to remove all street dogs in just two months—and that the cost of building shelters, and maintaining them was ludicrously high.
This is where data comes into the picture—and adds to the confusion. Obviously, no one knew the actual cost, but that didn’t stop them from throwing out numbers at us. Maneka Gandhi said 3,000 pounds would be required to house the 3 lakh dogs. The construction of each shelter would be Rs 4-5 crore, and 1.5 lakh people would be required to maintain the shelters. Rs 5 crore would be the cost of feeding the dogs, each week (Times Now). Ouch.
Then there were the statistics on dog bites and rabies cases—each channel had its own figures, each guest expert another. The Times of India demonstrated the problem of fixing a number: It said the government’s rabies death count in 2022 is just 21. The World Health Organisation (WHO), using government and other Indian sources, says 305. And, according to TOI, the WHO’s own estimate for rabies deaths in India that year is actually 18,000 (TOI, 13 August, “Over 10,000 get bitten by dogs every day in India”). Got it?
On Times Now Navbharat, we were told there have been 37, 17, 336 dog bites in India so far in 2025 and that the respected medical journal Lancet says India has 35 per cent of the world’s rabies cases. Supreme Court advocate Ashwini Dubey said the Ministry of Animal Husbandry figures put dog bites for 2024 at 22 lakh (CNN News 18). Ambika Shukla told NDTV 24×7 that there were only 54 rabies cases in the country last year.
And so it went on and on, each side of the argument citing data to support their point of view. The Supreme Court may have delivered its ruling on stray dogs, but the public jury is still out—and will probably stay that way.
So, perhaps we should stop barking up trees.
The author tweets @shailajabajpai. Views are personal.
(Edited by Ratan Priya)