New Delhi: India’s apex animal welfare agency has proclaimed that allowing stray animals such as cats, dogs, monkeys and cattle to roam the streets amounts to cruelty and told the states to create animal shelters, among other steps, or face legal action.
The Animal Welfare Board of India, a unit of the Union environment ministry, has sent an advisory to the states seeking action by local municipal authorities to provide shelter, food and water to all "such helpless animals" in urban and rural areas.
"Allowing stray animals on the street or road… amounts to cruelty to animals. Along with (the) animals, (the) public also suffers," the board’s advisory has said.
It says local authorities have the responsibility to protect stray dogs, cats and monkeys from cruelty and to properly implement sterilisation schemes to curb dog and monkey bites on people.
Animal welfare activists have expressed surprise at the advisory, arguing that state and local authorities lack the human and financial resources to provide food and shelter to hundreds of thousands of animals, and stressing that the law prohibits the impounding of stray animals.
"This is an unrealistic demand. Municipal officers who receive this advisory are likely to burst out laughing," said Nugehalli Jayasimha, a lawyer and managing director of Humane Society International, India, a group campaigning for animal welfare.
Jayasimha said the Supreme Court had clarified that stray animals cannot be impounded. "The appropriate solution to the issue of stray dogs is better management of garbage, anti-rabies vaccination campaigns, and scientific implementation of animal birth control," said Jayasimha, who was himself a board member earlier.
The board, in a separate advisory, has asked the states to protect and preserve grazing land that could be used for animal welfare. It has cited a 2014 Supreme Court ruling that it says advised the states to remove encroachments from grazing land and use them for animal welfare.
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