Whose rights matter more – dogs or humans? This false binary lies at the heart of what, over the course of a single day, has become a heated debate between a new political divide across the political divide – no longer between the left and the right, but between those who love dogs, and those who are alarmed at how dogs seem to be loved rather a lot more than marginalised humans. This is a situation where the other side is taking the heat that should justly be directed towards the institution that is taking oppressive initiative across the animal-human divide: in this case, the Supreme Court. When the apex court issued its order, it directed the Delhi government in the NCR region to immediately begin the removal of stray dogs from all localities to shelters, and stated that they were not to be returned to the streets that are their homes. To start off, this came out of the blue – this is not a response to a complaint or a case, but is the court taking cognisance of its own accord. One can sympathetically imagine that the entity might have had someone rather dear to them who was recently attacked by a dog, and suffered the tribulations associated with the process, but the court is not a person.Positive action, collective punishment, enforceability It has in this regard, taken positive action associated with no longer continuing to be a neutral bystander to the larger issue, but has exerted itself to impose its will upon resolving it. To my understanding, a more appropriate exertion of its powers would be to identify the issue and call upon the bodies associated with addressing it, which in this case would be the Municipal Corporation of Delhi, or various ministries associated with animal welfare, as this is first and foremost an animal welfare issue. There is due process that the court itself has established to be followed, that it is now throwing to the wind. This is not the first time the court has done this – it is just perhaps the first time it has done it to dogs. Ostensibly, the court’s wish is to resolve the issue of rabid dogs biting people, to which it is subjecting the entire population of dogs in the NCR area to be put into ‘shelters’. This is a case of disproportionate action and collective punishment.Also read: Supreme Court’s War on Delhi’s Stray Dogs is Misguided and Legally ProblematicIf this sounds familiar, it’s because it is. From communication blackouts in a whole Union territory to prevent ‘terrorists’ from communicating, to detaining Muslims on the pretext of removing undocumented migrants to demolishing homes of the same group, ostensibly to prevent encroachment – this is an issue that is usually the domain of the executive rather than the judiciary, though the distinction is vanishing when viewed through the lens of the executive court – one that allows, through the endorsement or absence of action, the various brutalities of the executive that it is meant to check. Even if one assumes ‘criminality’ in this regard as being worthy of the death penalty, that is already a system in place for rabid dogs. There are guidelines and protocols around the euthanesia of rabid animals that are well in place, but as with humans, so with creatures – the wilful imprisonment and punishment of a group at large does absolutely nothing to reduce or curb the issue at hand. The World Health Organization reiterates that culling free-roaming dogs does not reduce rabies – an effective vaccination policy does. But is the Supreme Court calling for a cull? This brings up the hidden issue – the wilful ignorance of the enforceability of its direction, juxtaposed against the implications of this indifference. The court has ordered all of the NCR’s dogs to be taken to a shelter, where they are supposed to be taken care of. As anyone who has had the slightest proximity to Delhi’s animal shelters will tell you, they suffer from the same issue of overcrowdedness as do India’s jails at large. To house bodies, both dog and human, requires physical space to house these bodies with basic dignity. It requires capital to pay the number of people required to do the labour of maintaining health, sanitation, and food; it requires funds for the medical necessities to ensure health, the regular supplies for cleaning, the ingredients to allow basic nutrition. Under conditions which fail all these due to lack of capital, the ‘shelter’ is a jail. But should we be so surprised at the Supreme Court’s indifference to this, when it is willing to subject humans to conditions that are unsuitable even for livestock? It has called on the NCR government to create shelters with a capacity for at least 5,000 dogs in 6-8 weeks. Even if we go by its accepted standards for human jails, which often contain double the capacity that they are designed for, Delhi’s dog population measures 10 lakh – nearly half of which are already sterilised. Where do these remaining dogs go, if they cannot be in a shelter, and they cannot be on the streets? Should we tell them to go to Pakistan? The SC cannot enforce more shelters, because it does not have the funds. What it can do is enforce the dogs are removed, and kept in conditions that will create a large amount of preventable and unnecessary deaths through increased stress, injury and illness. In the event the conditions don’t do it, it will act as an implicit nod to culling, be it from neighbourhood vigilantes or overstretched organisations forced to make hard choices around euthanasia – the dreadful algebra of who deserves to live if there are only so many resources for so many lives. The SC’s indifference to enforceability has been manifest in its engagement with the Bulldozer Raj, which takes a great deal of public pride in demolishing the homes of Indian Muslims under various flimsy pretexts. It has created guidelines around the due process with which demolitions must take place, which fall short of actually criminalising those doing it or the act itself, saying that “Compensation was the only way to impress the seriousness upon the authorities.” It does not need to be said that the demolitions continue.On both sides of the aisle, we now see outrage and confusion – on the right, a disturbed group of dog lovers who would otherwise wilfully call for these conditions to be applied to Indian Muslims find it inhumane. Some others, like Kapil Mishra, whose words allegedly led to riots that have killed 53 people in India’s capital, have found it commendable.Pic 1:Swapan Dasgupta on banishing street dogs.Pic 2:Swapan Dasgupta on TMC protests against attacks on Bengali migrants. https://t.co/6yDDrTNa60 pic.twitter.com/HnUPEB7xro— Alishan Jafri (@alishan_jafri) August 12, 2025सुप्रीम कोर्ट का ये ऑर्डर दिल्ली को रेबीज और बेसहारा पशुओं के भय से मुक्ति एक रास्ता दिखाता हैCM @gupta_rekha जी के नेतृत्व में दिल्ली सरकार का पशु विभाग सभी एजेंसियों के साथ मिलकर इस आदेश का अध्ययन करके इसको समुचित लागू करने की दिशा में आगे बढ़ेगाइस आदेश को समयबद्ध तरीके… https://t.co/wCkh1CrnoV— Kapil Mishra (@KapilMishra_IND) August 11, 2025On the left, we have people validly appalled that those who have been at best indifferent to human rights are suddenly finding themselves capable of organisation, advocacy, and most importantly, of empathy. This stray dog drama feels like a proper distraction. While everyone’s outraging out about it, the real big story which is voter fraud is getting pushed out of the news cycle. We’re falling right into their trap.— Shri (@shrishrishrii) August 12, 2025The wits, such as they are, are joining some dots too. Maybe send all the strays to the Election Commission. They’ll probably end up on the voters list anyway.— Hansal Mehta (@mehtahansal) August 12, 2025First, they came for the humans, and I said nothing…But at the heart of this is the fact that we are stumbling over the first instance of real bipartisan support over an issue – unlike in the case of war, where public liberals have to grumblingly accede to bombing people to appease baseline emotions of nationalism and security, this is an instance where we all genuinely do just love dogs. A strange issue, where you find the right and the left meeting on one ground or another: those who love dogs, those who hate them.Another way to see this: as part of a chain of demolitions, disenfranchisement, exclusions, and violence carried out against both animals & humans.— Nilanjana Roy 📚🦊 (@nilanjanaroy) August 12, 2025Human anthropocentrism being what it is, we have social consensus over which creatures deserve love and which do not – a rat will not find this outpouring of love, being socially classed as vermin despite their intelligence and cleanliness. Livestock, on the other hand, by way of being both religiously coded and having commercial value, are given the same rights as property. A cow, at the extreme of this continuum, has more rights than a human – slaughtering a cow will give you lifetime imprisonment in Gujarat, while in Uttar Pradesh, you get hauled up under the NSA and jailed without charge – even putting it in danger can put you in prison for 10 years. In comparison, if you and 12 friends come together to kill a Muslim man, you’re home freer.To that end, the protection of animal rights is not mutually exclusive from that of human rights. To care about human rights is to care about animal rights, because they together involve caring about institutional wrongs. What we are seeing now is simply that the institution which has violated human rights has extended this violation to a creature that can we can all intuitively understand does not deserve this punishment – that there is no universe in which our canine friends will ever deserve to suffer like this, even if they are ‘bad dogs’. That when we are faced with an institution who sees itself capable of exerting a tyrannical power to snap their fingers and divest us of natural rights, the problem is not who belongs inside the ‘us’ – it’s about the kind of power these institutions deserve to wield at all. Naomi Barton is a literary agent. She is a former audience engagement editor of The Wire.