The Dog, The Victim, or The State That ‘Looked Away’?

Who taught the stray dog to be ‘aggressive’? Who trained it to ‘multiply’ unchecked? Who signed the ‘budget’ for Animal Birth Control and then forgot the streets existed? And when chaos predictably followed neglect, who found it ‘convenient’ to blame the only creature in this equation without agency?

India has perfected a peculiar civic ritual: outsource responsibility upward to “nature,” downward to “animals,” and sideways to “dog lovers,” while the State — flush with files, funds, and excuses — slips quietly out the back door.

Let us be blunt. Stray dogs do not wake up one morning with a policy memo titled Urban Hostility Program. Aggression in animals is not ideology; it is ecology. It is hunger, territorial stress, unmanaged reproduction, disease, and constant human provocation. When a city fails to manage these variables, aggression is not an aberration. It is the most rational outcome available to a non-rational being.

Now consider the statutory reality. The State and municipal bodies are explicitly tasked with vaccination, sterilization, monitoring, and humane population control. Budgets are allocated. Tenders are floated. Files are moved. Press releases are issued. On paper, everything works beautifully. On the street, dogs keep multiplying, rabies persists, and neighborhoods oscillate between fear and fury. That gap between paper and pavement has a name: dereliction of duty. When funds earmarked for Animal Birth Control quietly evaporate into administrative fog — or worse, personal enrichment — what follows is not a “dog problem.” It is institutional misconduct wearing a canine mask.

Yet the public discourse is framed with surgical dishonesty. “Stray dogs are dangerous.” As if danger emerges in a vacuum. As if population explosions happen by moral choice. As if biology can be hauled into court and reprimanded for reproducing.

Let us test this logic with a comparison that makes people uncomfortable — because it should.

When a woman is raped and becomes pregnant, society does not ask why her body followed biology. We do not accuse her physiology of irresponsibility. Responsibility is fixed squarely where it belongs: on the perpetrator, and on the State if it failed to prevent a repeat offender, ignored warning signs, or allowed systemic impunity. Biology is never on trial. Failure of duty is.

Apply the same ethical grammar to stray dogs. When an unsterilized male dog impregnates a female dog, neither is exercising moral judgment. They are following biological programming. The only actor in this triangle capable of foresight, planning, and prevention is the human State. If sterilization did not happen, it was not because dogs ‘resisted policy,’ it was because humans ‘failed to implement’ it.

So, who, exactly, is responsible for the resulting puppies? The female dog, for not reading municipal guidelines? The male dog, for ignoring a non-existent vasectomy? Or the authorities who were paid, mandated, and empowered to ensure this never happened?

Blaming dogs for overpopulation is like blaming floodwater for the absence of drainage. Convenient. Loud. Intellectually bankrupt.

And then comes the final act of civic theatre: punishment without accountability. Kill the dogs. Relocate them. Criminalize feeders. Issue court orders that discipline compassion while tiptoeing around administrative failure. This is governance by scapegoat. When the State cannot discipline its own machinery, it disciplines the voiceless.

Dog feeders become “enablers.” Dogs become “menaces.” Municipal workers remain invisible. Officials remain unexamined. Files remain unsigned. Funds remain untraced. The city congratulates itself for being “tough,” even as the root cause remains intact and metastasizing.

This is not about choosing between human safety and animal welfare. That is a false binary sold to an exhausted public. Effective sterilization and vaccination reduce aggression, stabilize populations, and improve public safety. Every serious urban study confirms this. What fails repeatedly is not the model, but the will and integrity to execute it.

A city that cannot sterilize dogs but can moralize about them is not under threat from animals. It is under threat from its own administrative hollowness.

So, let us ask the questions that matter, the ones that rarely make it into courtrooms or press briefings.

• When funds for Animal Birth Control vanish, who ‘audits’ that disappearance?
• When sterilization targets are ‘missed’ year after year, who is held answerable?
• When aggression rises after neglect, why is ‘biology’ blamed instead of ‘bureaucracy’?
• And when ‘compassion is punished’ but ‘incompetence is protected,’ are we still talking about law, or merely about power preserving itself?

Because until these questions are faced honestly, the dogs will remain on the streets, the blame will remain misdirected, and the State will remain exactly where it prefers to be: nowhere near responsibility, yet everywhere in control.

Image (c) istock.com