Between Law And Ethics: Judicial Intercession On Stray Dogs In India (2025) And Their Implications For Human-Animal Coexistence

Abstract

The stray dog provisions in the Supreme Court orders issued on 2025 are of fundamental ethical and constitutional concern with regard to the status and role of animals in urban administration, first by directing the removal of stray dogs to shelters and second by releasing sterilized and vaccinated dogs and confiscating the ones found rabid or aggressive. Such decisions are contrary to the constitutional rights of the animals, such as protection of animals and the intrinsic value principle, which also says that the protection of public health at that area will be impacted by their actions of catching, seizing and killing the street dogs. This article suggests that these interventions are normatively incoherent, because they do not respect the animal's right to life, dignity, and territorial belonging; and because they are constitutionally problematic to the extent that they place the animal's right to life, dignity, and territorial belonging on a second tier, behind a risk management logic of humanity. Based on theoretical reflections upon multispecies ethics, post humane political theory and critical animal studies, the critical analysis of Supreme Court judgements on co dwellers raises the question of how judicial reasoning renders animals as underlings and not co dwellers. It is a product of analysing Supreme Court jurisprudence, policy documents, media reporting and, most important, the public reactions of stakeholders to the court's decisions to show how vulnerabilities of animals, care and spatiality have been re-framed in thematic sense making in ethics. The results demonstrate how juridical anthropocentrism exists, and how to implement an ethic of the animal in local governance.