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Hounded

12 0
10.02.2026

The experience of India offers Lahore a clear warning. When municipal failure in managing stray dogs escalated into a public health, the Indian Supreme Court was forced to intervene - not to endorse killing, but to reaffirm that sterilisation and vaccination are the only solutions grounded in law and science.

Lahore's stray dog crisis is usually discussed in moments of panic — when a child is bitten, after a video goes viral, in events of public fear spilling onto the streets. The response is equally predictable: calls for culling, hurried municipal action, and official claims that the problem has been "addressed". It never is. Because what Lahore faces is not just an animal problem.

India has already travelled this path. When stray dog incidents escalated across Indian cities, public outrage and municipal inertia eventually drew the Supreme Court into the debate. As Andrew Rowan explains in The Indian Supreme Court Acts on the Stray Dog Issue: Is it a Crisis or an Opportunity?, the Court did not intervene to endorse mass killing. It intervened because........

© The Express Tribune