Growing up in rural India, my grandmother fed the village dog half a chapati and a bowl of milk each afternoon, surely insufficient for his needs. The dog survived by searching for food in nearby houses. Years later, living in Delhi, I encountered stray dogs refusing biscuits, overfed by competing households to care for them.
India’s unique blend of religious and cultural values creates a deep tolerance towards non-human animals and wildlife, among both rich and poor, often based on millennia of coexistence. People consciously endure significant risks to live with animals. However, this dynamic is changing as cities grow and their dogs become more territorial in shared, crowded and dirtier spaces.
India has at least 60 million stray dogs, an estimate more than a decade old. More recent surveys found around 1 million in Delhi alone. Relatedly, India also accounts for more than a third of global rabies deaths.
Unlike most Western countries, Indian culture and laws prohibit sacrifice. Instead, the dogs must be trapped, sterilized, vaccinated and, crucially, returned to their exact territory. In practice, these mandates are frequently ignored.
Things changed in August 2025. After several children were attacked by stray dogs, the country’s Supreme Court briefly ordered that all stray dogs in Delhi and the surrounding region be rounded up and placed in shelters or kennels, promising dog-free streets for the first time in decades.
The order was unworkable—there are simply no shelters for millions of dogs—and sparked a fierce reaction from animal rights groups. Two days later, the court reversed its decision and reinstated the current sterilization policy.
Subsequent decisions have focused on the issue. In November 2025, the court ordered that dogs be removed from schools, hospitals and public transportation areas nationwide, in addition to imposing restrictions on public feeding and encouraging fencing to keep dogs away.
Most recently, on January 7, 2026, he instructed authorities to fence and secure all of India’s 1.5 million schools and colleges against dogs, all within just eight weeks. However, like the previous order, the aggressive timeline ignores infrastructure challenges and is unlikely to significantly reduce bite frequency or resulting infections. The court is holding hearings with interested parties as it tries to find a middle ground between mass dog culling and animal welfare concerns.
The country is divided. It seems that the state cannot kill these dogs, house them or control them. The question of what to do with them is a question of public safety and animal welfare, but also something deeper: the latest chapter in one of evolution’s most remarkable partnerships.
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A coexistence experiment
Dogs are the only vertebrate species that followed human migration out of Africa to all climates and settlements. Although the exact timing of domestication is uncertain, we know that dogs evolved to live alongside humans. But our interspecies bonds now face the unprecedented challenge of tropical urbanism.
In recent centuries, as dogs have gained a place in our homes, humans have created more than 400 breeds, tuned for companionship, work or aesthetics. This coevolution matters, as it means that dogs are attuned to human cues and form strong bonds with specific people and places. In urban India, where dogs are ownerless but not truly wild, that bond is expressed as territorial behavior over a house or someone who feeds them.
India’s unique social-ecological laboratory
India offers an incomparable window to study this relationship. Historically, stray dogs served as scavengers. In poorer communities, they still do. But in more prosperous districts, they are now fed intentionally.
Preliminary research I conducted in Delhi with my colleague Bharti Sharma reveals that dogs organize themselves into packs around specific homes where a few committed feeders can meet almost 100% of their dietary needs. This sustains much higher dog densities than carrion ever could.
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The urban collision
This is where ancestral coexistence collides with modern urban design. The streets of India are multi-use spaces. In tropical climates, waste pickers and manual workers often operate at night, the same hours when dogs are most territorial, and when the wealthier residents who feed them are asleep.
The dogs adapted their behavior—barking, chasing, and occasionally biting—in ways that are involuntarily rewarded by feeders, but that create dangers for others. The statistics are worrying: millions of bites and thousands of deaths from rabies every year.
However, some of the backlash against the Supreme Court’s mandates was inevitable. As gentrification changes who decides what urban life should be like, a conflict of values emerged. Some value the shared presence of animals, while others prioritize the elimination of risks.
The way forward
We may have reached “peak mutualism” in Indian cities. Despite the daily annoyances that we all suffer: the barking, the chasing, millions continue to feed these dogs. However, the same dog that wags its tail at familiar feeders can bite someone new. This is not irrational aggression; It is territorial protection born of a deep association with a specific human community.
Western cities euthanized their stray dogs long ago because social priorities were more uniform. India’s diversity means that there is no such consensus. It may be 20 or 30 years before your urban population uniformly views the presence of territorial dogs as intolerable.
As India urbanizes, it must decide whether to maintain spaces for ancestral relationships that precede the cities themselves or follow the Western path of total management. My grandmother’s half-chapati ritual represented an ancient pact: minimal investment, peaceful coexistence, and mutual benefit. The Delhi dogs, overfed and defending their territory, represent a new and more intensified intimacy, and it is not clear whether this benefits both species.
This article was originally published by The Conversation
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