Vadodara’s proposal to fine individuals feeding strays in public violates fundamental rights and duties, and undermines dog population management efforts

The report that the Vadodara Municipal Corporation (VMC) proposes to punish those feeding animals in public by fining them Rs100 on the first occasion and Rs200 for subsequent ones, makes disconcerting reading. According to the Constitution of India's Article 51A(g), a citizen's fundamental duties include the one “to protect and improve the natural environment including forests, lakes, rivers and wild life, and to have compassion for living creatures;” “living creatures” include animals; feeding them is a legitimate expression of compassion for them.

Also, an important fundamental right guaranteed by the Constitution is the freedom of religion, providing for freedom of conscience and free profession, practice, and propagation of religion, freedom to manage religious affairs, freedom from certain taxes and freedom from religious instructions in certain educational institutions. Another important right provides for the conservation by any section of citizens of their culture, language or script, and right of minorities to establish and administer educational institutions of their choice.

The VMC's proposal, if implemented, will curtail both these rights. Hindus, for example, revere cows and many of them feed stray cattle in the streets believing this to be a pious act which will add to their reservoir of good Karma. Penalising them for that will be penalising them for acting upon their religious conviction. Also penalising feeding will curb the fundamental right of those to whom feeding animals is a part of their culture. Besides, such feeding does not undermine the independence, sovereignty and integrity of India, the security of the State, friendly relations with foreign countries, public order, decency or morality-grounds on which the scope of the fundamental rights, other than that to life and personal liberty, may be restricted.

In the case of stray dogs, it will undermine the implementation of the Animal Birth Control (Dog) Rules, 2001, which is the law of the land. It provides for controlling the population of stray dogs by removing them for sterilisation and vaccination against rabies and returning them to places from where they had been lifted. Feeding stray dogs is critically important to the programme's implementation as it makes for their easy capture (by those who feed) for sterilisation and post sterilisation annual vaccination against rabies, which is absolutely essential.

Besides, the sterilisation and vaccination programme, as the World Health Organisation (WHO) has made clear, is the only effective method for controlling stray dog populations. For example, WHO's Technical Report Series 931 says, “Since 1960s, ABC programmes, along with rabies vaccination have been advocated as a method to control urban street male and female dog population and ultimately rabies in Asia.” The programme has a clear rationale; dogs are territorial, with those living in one area preventing others from coming in. Hence dogs sterilised, vaccinated and returned to their habitat, keep unsterilised and unvaccinated dogs away from it. Those implementing the ABC programme in a city or district can then turn to another area and similarly sterilise and vaccinate the resident stray dogs there. They can thus systematically cover the entire city or district in question and proceed to adjoining areas. The stray dog population in these will fall steeply, if not disappear altogether, as the sterilised ones live out their normal spans of life.

As the WHO's Technical Report Series 931 points out, reproduction control (ABC programme) will have to be accompanied by preventing pet dogs from being either impregnated by stray dogs or merging with their population, and managing garbage in a manner that prevents stray dogs from accessing them. The last is very important. Garbage on the roads will attract stray dogs from other areas once the local ones die in the normal course. lastly, as Technical Report Series 931 points out, “Mass canine vaccination campaigns have been the most effective measures for controlling canine rabies.” As seen above, feeding of stray dogs is essential for success in vaccination against canine rabies, which is critically important for preventing human rabies through dog bites. The VMC must scrap its proposal.