Who Let the Dogs Out? The Supreme Court, Community Dogs, and the Rise of Biosecurity Constitutionalism

Aditya Anand Singh

Aditya Anand Singh is an independent researcher and author based in India.

On November 7, 2025, the Supreme Court of India issued an extensive suo motu judgment that orders the removal of community dogs from schools, hospitals, railway stations, bus depots, and highways across the country. A three-justice bench framed the judgment as an attempt to address the issue of street dogs, which they described as a “menace” posing constitutional concerns for public health and biological risk under Article 21, which protects the right to life and liberty. As hundreds of thousands of citizens have taken to the streets in protest, marking one of the most significant animal rights-related social mobilizations in recent history, it has become clear that the judgment disrupts far more than the canine population. It touches the intimate textures of Indian social life, where community dogs have long formed part of neighborhood safety, companionship, and everyday care.

The Court’s reasoning epitomizes an emergent form of “biosecurity constitutionalism,” one that treats dogs primarily as vectors of disease and danger to be removed, confined, and managed. Such jurisprudential logic, while presented as a measure to protect human life, obscures a deeper reality: that humans and community dogs coexist in mutually sustaining relationships, and that safety itself is a social, not merely biological, achievement. By sidelining the well-established Capture-Sterilize-Vaccinate-Release (CSVR) model in favor of forced relocation to non-existent shelters, the judgment risks undermining both animal welfare and human well-being. It also opens a rather troubling doctrinal terrain: once the Court adopts a purely biological lens on a social issue, what prevents similar reasoning from being extended to other vulnerable groups and future rights claims?

The Judgment and Its Core Shift

The November 7 order is, on its face, an attempt to standardize and strengthen administrative responses to rising reports of dog-bite incidents across India (judgment, para 8). The Court structured its intervention in three expansive parts: first, a nationwide review of State and Union Territory compliance with earlier directions; second, the extension of Rajasthan High Court’s mandate requiring the removal of cattle and stray animals from highways and expressways; and third, and most significantly, the introduction of a new, constitutionally anchored regime for “institutional areas” (judgment, para 4). Educational institutions, hospitals, sports complexes, bus stands, railway stations, and other public facilities are now required to secure their perimeters, appoint Nodal Officers, undergo regular inspections, and ensure that any stray dog found within their premises is removed, sterilized, vaccinated, and crucially, not released back to its original territory (judgment, para 10).

This single departure from the established CSVR model marks the jurisprudential hinge of the judgment. For two decades, the CSVR model, based on the Animal Birth Control Rules (2001, modified in 2023) and grounded in the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act (1960), has recognized that community dogs must return to their home territories for the system to function safely and humanely. It is a framework built not only on scientific research but on social practice. Neighborhood dogs from stable packs deter theft and develop trust-based relationships with residents. By overriding the release component in entire classes of spaces, the Court effectively restructures the normative logic underlying India’s animal welfare regime without acknowledging the socio-legal or empirical foundations on which the framework rests. In practice, this further destabilizes well-established dog populations, compromises public health safeguards, and weakens the model’s carefully constructed balance between animal welfare and community coexistence.

Limits and Risks of Biosecurity Constitutionalism

What makes the Court’s turn so striking is not only that it departs from a long-standing statutory framework, but that it does so by adopting a view of public health that is, in many ways, erroneous. The judgment assumed that removing community dogs from the spaces mentioned will make them safer. Yet decades of empirical research and the lived experience of millions of Indians suggest the opposite: neighborhoods with stable dog populations often see very few or no cases of bites and aggression, and indeed, lower crime. Community dogs deter theft, provide informal security at night, and develop predictable behavioral patterns once integrated into local routines.

By framing dogs as biological hazards rather than social beings embedded in communities, the Court’s approach narrows the meaning of safety to something measured only through the metric of disease and attack. This vision of safety is, at best, incomplete, and at worst, severely misguided and counterproductive. Public health, as the 1960 Act recognized, cannot be achieved by evacuating animals from all spaces but by sustaining stable human-animal relationships, effective waste management, and scientifically guided sterilization programs. The Court’s order sidesteps this richer understanding and instead embraces a kind of biosecurity constitutionalism: the notion that constitutional duties are fulfilled by controlling biological threats, even at the cost of social bonds, statutory design, and humane obligations.

The danger of this approach extends far beyond dogs. Once biological reductionism of social and political issues becomes constitutionally ascendant, it can become precedent. One can easily imagine future cases where “biological realities” are invoked to narrow protections for transgender persons, or where “biological vulnerability” is used to justify exclusionary policies against certain groups, or where climate policy is reduced to narrow technocratic risk management. We have already seen courts elsewhere (for example, the UK Supreme Court in For Women Scotland) deploy ostensibly biological definitions in ways that roll back hard-won rights. The Indian Court has been a global leader in resisting such reductionism. This judgment, however, opens a rather perilous doctrinal path that could be misused if future benches interpret constitutional guarantees through the blunt lens of biology.

Constitutional jurisprudence cannot be allowed to harden into biology. Rights are social, safety is social, communities are social (for an excellent read on this, see The Strange Alchemy of Life and Law by Justice Albie Sachs). To collapse them into biosecurity categories is to flatten the complexity of everyday life—and to ignore the fact that humans and community dogs have co-produced the urban commons for generations.

Conclusion: Rethinking Constitutionalism in a More-than-Human Republic

The sweeping public response to the Court’s judgment reveals something the order itself never fully acknowledged: community dogs are not an external “menace” to be managed but part of the social architecture of Indian life. When the Court orders their removal from public spaces, it unsettles the relationship of care, coexistence and mutual protection that has evolved over generations. The protests emerging across the country are not only about dogs, but they are also about the constitutional community people want to live in. This is why, I argue, that the turn toward biosecurity constitutionalism is so fraught. By casting Article 21 as a mandate to control perceived risk through evacuation and enclosure, the Court risks hollowing out the richer commitments that Indian constitutionalism has long cultivated: compassion, dignity, interdependence, and a sense of shared belonging across species. A purely biological lens cannot hold these values; indeed, it can only corrode them. India does not need a choice between human safety and animal welfare. It needs a constitutional imagination capacious enough to understand that the two are inherently interlinked: that stable, vaccinated dog populations support safer neighborhoods; that humane laws produce humane societies; and that public health is strengthened when communities, not cages, anchor our legal policy designs.

Aditya Anand Singh is an independent researcher and author based in India.

Suggested Citation: Aditya Anand Singh, ‘Who Let the Dogs Out? The Supreme Court, Community Dogs, and the Rise of Biosecurity Constitutionalism’ IACL-AIDC Blog (11 December 2025) Who Let the Dogs Out? The Supreme Court, Community Dogs, and the Rise of Biosecurity Constitutionalism — IACL-IADC Blog