Earlier this month, a two-judge Bench of the Supreme Court advised a Noida resident who had complained of being harassed for feeding stray dogs to feed them in her home or open a shelter. Predictably, responses to these passing comments — which the frenzied social media world mistakenly interpreted as a judgment — revealed the deep fault lines over the issue of stray dogs. In India, you are either a dog lover or hater, with no scope for mutual comprehension. In fact, the barrage of uninformed comment from both sides of the divide following this “advice” from the apex court highlights like nothing else the gross institutional failure to sensibly deal with a problem that is gaining momentum as growing urbanisation encroaches on spaces once inhabited by animals and birds.
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