India's plan to remove millions of stray dogs could herald next global pandemic scientists warn

Sindhoor Pangal with community dogs

India’s plan to round up and confine millions of community dogs is being branded a potential global public-health disaster, with scientists warning it could create the “perfect storm” for the next zoonotic outbreak.

More than 2,000 citizens, including leading doctors, epidemiologists, veterinarians and behavioural scientists, have signed an open letter cautioning that mass relocation of street dogs into mega-shelters risks unleashing rabies surges, rodent explosions and novel disease threats that would not stop at India’s borders.

At the centre of the storm is a Supreme Court order directing large-scale displacement of community dogs, a move critics say overrides India’s own Animal Birth Control Rules 2023 and decades of World Health Organization backed guidance.

Sindhoor Pangal, anthrozoologist, canine behaviour consultant and co-author of a technical submission along with Dr. Anandita Bhadra of The Dog Lab at IISER Kolkata and Dr. Chinny Krishan the founder of Blue Cross, did not mince her words.

“This is not just an animal welfare issue,” she said. “It is a public-health issue of international consequence. Mass aggregation of stressed, immunocompromised animals in high-density facilities creates exactly the kind of epidemiological conditions we know amplify zoonotic disease.”

Experts argue that dogs currently act as a “bio-buffer” in towns and cities, mitigating human-wildlife conflict, scavenging waste and limiting access by rats and other species known to carry pathogens such as leptospirosis and plague. Remove them, they say, and an ecological vacuum is created.

Sindhoor Pangal is one of the many animal welfare campaigners in India speaking out

“When you suddenly take away a territorial, vaccinated dog population, you destabilise the entire urban ecosystem,” said Pangal. “New, unvaccinated dogs move in. Rodent numbers rise. Surveillance collapses. That is how you manufacture risk.”

India has made significant gains under its sterilisation and vaccination programme. Human rabies cases have reportedly fallen by 75 per cent since 2003. The scientists warn that abandoning this model for mass detention could reverse that progress.

The open letter describes mega shelters as “high-risk bio-hazard zones” in a country with already stretched veterinary infrastructure and rising antibiotic resistance in humans. Housing even a fraction of India’s estimated street dog population, it estimates, would cost states more than ₹6,000 crore over a decade, diverting funds from sanitation and frontline healthcare.

“Confinement on this scale is not control,” Pangal said. “It is destabilisation. You break herd immunity by removing vaccinated dogs, and you create pockets of susceptibility that are extremely hard to monitor. In public-health terms, that is reckless.”

There are also warnings of global scrutiny. Rabies elimination is closely tracked by international agencies, and any resurgence would raise uncomfortable questions about policy choices in the world’s most populous nation.

Scientists behind the submission argue that the solution is not removal but intensification of WHO recommended approach of data-driven sterilisation and  vaccination, aiming for at 70 per cent coverage to maintain herd immunity.

“India has the chance to be a model for One Health approaches,” Pangal said. “But if we replace proven, humane, science-based systems with a mass detention experiment, the cost of failure will not be measured only in rupees. It will be measured in lives.”