Highlighting India’s questionable stray dog bite statistics, noted lawyer Siddhartha K Garg pens an open letter to an SC judge arguing that the path to safer streets does not lie in punishing healthy community dogs but in ending the commercial pipeline that keeps producing designer pets

Dear Justice Sandeep Mehta Sir,

If you really want to end this issue once and for all then please consider this one line – “Hereby, the dog industry is banned and anyone who wants to own a pet dog must adopt from shelters or the streets”. Sir, there is no such thing as “purebreed” dogs.

In fact, purebreed is a myth because most of these breeds do not even exist in nature and are a result of the incestuous eugenics movement in Europe 1860s onwards, where humans indulged in genetic manipulation for our amusement. That means forcibly mating fathers and daughters or mothers and sons to maintain a certain look of the breed. In simpler words purebred means inbred.

The result is that these dogs are born with a plethora of congenital diseases and soon die of organ failure. One cannot visit a vet without a terminal liver or kidney failure pug (the dog from the Vodafone ad) standing in line before you. And since most people consider these poor creatures as things to dispose of at the first sign of malfunction, they dump them in NGOs, who then are forced to take care of them and this diverts precious resources from actually running an on-ground sterilization programme.

If the pet dog industry was to be banned and people forced to only adopt Indies then this will kick in a virtuous cycle as the stray dog population reduces and NGOs will get resources freed to aggressively implement sterilization. A milder step would be to incentivize adoption of dogs as pets from shelters by levying a high tax on store-bought dogs. This along with policies such as CNVR (Collect, Neuter, Vaccinate, Return) program has made the Netherlands the first country to have zero stray dogs in the world! Indies are 100% all-natural dogs and more suited to the Indian climate as opposed to some who insist on getting let’s say, a husky, which is a dog with its origin in the frozen desert of Siberia and not the swelter of Delhi.

Secondly, My Lord, in the 19th May judgment you highlighted the gravity of the stray dog bites problem by citing a large number of newspaper reports but you did not counter the arguments raised by the counsels appearing for the stray dogs in the hearing, which questioned the reliability of these reports.

For example, Senior Advocate Percival Billimoria argued that there is an RTI reply from AIIMS Delhi, which categorically states that rather counting each bite as one incident, the number is actually multiplied by five because each rabies injection for that one bite is counted as a separate bite in and of itself! Even the author got an RTI from the National Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) under the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, which confirms the same.

Furthermore, the same NCDC RTI said that there is no distinction being made regarding dog bites from stray dogs vs pet dogs and stray dogs which were provoked or unprovoked. Surely, stray dogs shouldn’t be pilloried if they were in fact provoked to an extent that they bit the abuser and similarly, why villainise stray dogs when the bite actually came from a pet dog! A 2015 study from Ernakulam General Hospital tells the same story, where it was shown that in the same year, as per the data, of the 1,074 dog bite cases reported at the hospital this year, pet dogs were the culprits in 75.6% of cases.

Lordship, the problem is that these objections were conveniently side-stepped and not a word was expended in even discussing, let alone discarding them. The author has no issues with the SC discarding the arguments made by the counsels, but they should be dealt and addressed by the court in the written order, especially since we had to pay a good amount of money to be heard, despite having a fundamental right guarantee to be heard under Article 32 of the Constitution.

Lastly, My Lord, you wrote on page 14 of the November 07, 2025 order that “National Law School of India University, Bengaluru has a huge population of strays which threaten the safety of the students, staff and faculty members alike”. My Lord, that is not true. The Society for Non-Human Persons (SNHP) which is the animal welfare collective at NLS has issued a statement that mentions that the campus currently houses 18 dogs, a historic low from the pre-pandemic population of 40+ dogs and that in they have had zero rabies and dog bite cases by campus dogs in the past five years.

I please request you to gaze at the picture attached with this article. This is an “Institutional areas” dog on the campus of NLS Bangalore. The dog is in the embrace of a student there. Surely, this dog doesn’t look like a public threat or a biting menace. I doubt that this dog is even capable of mustering a strong bark. Why would you want to consign such friendly dogs to the bowels of a horrible hell hole called a shelter. Please accommodate such dogs. Why relocate them? Please consider altering the institutional land dogs order. Some are very docile dogs who wouldn’t say boo to a goose.

A concerned citizen who just wants peace.

END OF ARTICLE