Menace traces India’s shift from brutal dog culling to Animal Birth Control, interviewing mostly activists regarding the issue of rising free roaming street dogs in India. Vishal Bhutani’s 'Menace' asks how Indian cities can manage this issue without cruelty while placing the blame on local government bodies. While it is a good attempt, Menace falters in who it centres, NGO workers, vets, and animal welfare practitioners take up space while the voices of waste workers, children, and daily‑wage labourers most exposed to free‑roaming dogs are largely absent.
A few months after the Supreme Court ordered all of Delhi-NCR’s estimated one million stray dogs to be permanently shifted to shelters that mostly did not exist, I watched a screening and panel discussion of Vishal Bhutani’s documentary, 'Menace', at the Bangalore International Centre.
At the time, in response to the order, protests erupted, and animal activists were detained by police. Footage made rounds on social media decrying state brutality. Detentions during peaceful protests are, however, the average experience for any citizen exercising the democratic right to demonstrate in India.
As a pet parent, I can empathise with the issue, and I also feel the need to look at this from a wider lens.
Dog bite cases reported nationally rose from roughly 2.2 million in 2022 to 3.7 million in 2024, according to government data while a 2004 WHO–Association for the Prevention and Control of Rabies in India (APCRI) survey reported around 17.4 million animal bites and roughly 20,000 human rabies deaths each year in India. A 2022–23 community-based study published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases now estimates about 9.1 million animal bites annually and around 5,700 human rabies deaths. According to government data, while there has been a substantial decline in rabies deaths over two decades, it still remains something to be tackled.
Globally, rabies causes an estimated 59,000 human deaths every year, with over 95 percent of those occurring in Africa and Asia. India remains a rabies-endemic country in the WHO South-East Asia Region, alongside Bangladesh, Nepal, Myanmar, and others.
Menace attempts to make a genuine contribution to this debate. It traces how Indian municipalities once relied on culling through brutal methods, including electrocution, as the default strategy for managing street dog populations. A 1964 study by the Blue Cross of India found that both the number of dogs killed annually and the number of human rabies deaths had been rising together since 1919, showing that culling was ineffective even then.
A lot of research has since confirmed what that data suggested. A 2008 study published in Veterinary Parasitology followed dog culling in a Brazilian neighbourhood and found that around 60 percent of dogs were killed even though only about a quarter were infected, and that they were rapidly replaced by other dog populations. The World Organisation for Animal Health and the Global Alliance for Rabies Control both describe mass culling as ineffective for rabies control, as removing dogs in one area opens territory for others to move in.
The Animal Birth Control programme under the Animal Birth Control Rules, 2023, issued under the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act, has shown results where it has been implemented with some consistency.
A comparison of BBMP censuses from 2019 and 2023 showed a roughly 10 percent reduction in Bengaluru's street dog population after about 71% of stray dogs were sterilized. A vet in the film makes the useful point that a significant proportion of bites involve lactating mothers defending their litters, which points directly to the case for targeted female sterilisation.
Goa's experience offers compelling evidence where a coordinated One Health programme combining mass dog vaccination with school-based education and surveillance led to the elimination of human rabies deaths and a 92 percent drop in monthly canine rabies cases between 2013 and 2019. Sikkim is also another example that dog‑mediated rabies can be pushed to near zero with a long-term, state-wide programme of free mass dog vaccination, sterilisation, and community education over a decade to eliminate dog‑mediated human rabies.
Some commentators argue that the Animal Birth Control Rules are ineffective and that the only response is to remove all dogs to shelters and euthanise those that are not adopted. But historical evidence shows that indiscriminate culling does not reduce bites or rabies, while we have examples in the country where effective dog population management can be effective.
Meeting the 2030 WHO target of eliminating dog-mediated human rabies will require tightly integrating human and animal surveillance, rapidly scaling up dog vaccination nationwide.
Where the film becomes harder to defend is in who it centres on. The interviewees skew heavily toward NGO workers, vets, and animal welfare practitioners, while showing graphic violence against dogs to make a point against rounding up dogs. The result is that the voices of people most exposed to daily risk from free-roaming dogs, that is, waste workers, children walking to school, and daily-wage labourers who cannot reroute their commute around a territorial pack are pretty much absent. When I asked Bhutani about this omission, he mentioned that it was a "conscious decision". "I was trying to create a logical and factual discussion out of it". I was not too convinced.
For instance, In Telangana's Yacharam village, where 667 dog bite cases were recorded in a single year and the gram panchayat allegedly ordered the mass killing of around 100 strays, residents had never even heard of the ABC programme.
In an online opinion article, historian Saarang Narayan noted that when stray dogs bite children, it is rarely in gated communities. "More often than not, it is working-class bodies and lives that are at risk of being harmed by animals." The people calling loudest for dog rights are usually not the same people calling for the rights of the working-class residents who share streets with street animals and bear the actual cost of inadequate policy.
Many animal lovers who turned up to demonstrations against the Supreme Court order were absent from protests against other forms of state violence against the poor. The selectivity of when urban middle-class citizens choose to show up for what rights needs to be noted.
Dog welfare networks in India currently rest on individual volunteers and organizations concentrated in middle-class neighbourhoods, isolated from other societal issues. Dog management policies built on those foundations cannot reach the peripheries where, as the BBMP data shows, sterilisation coverage remains below 60 percent, and dog densities are now higher.
There is also the question of garbage, as dogs congregate where food waste accumulates. Cities that struggle with segregated waste collection and dignified working conditions for sanitation workers are cities that will continue to produce large free-roaming dog populations.
Narayan also argues that the "stray" label itself tells us something. A body outside the control of the state or the market is, by definition, a problem. Street dogs remind the bourgeois city that its control is incomplete, as do slums, hawkers, and informal workers. The anxious desire to clean up the streets, whether of dogs or of people, follows the same logic.
Arundhati Roy's writing on NGO-ization is useful here. The institutionalisation of activism into funded, professionalised organisations tends to narrow the scope of what gets questioned. An NGO addressing stray dog welfare is unlikely to spend its advocacy capital on the privatisation of waste management or the suppression of sanitation workers' unions. When human beings are not treated with dignity by a state that serves elite interests, extending that dignity to animals becomes a far-fetched aspiration; the struggles are connected, and activism that treats them as separate will remain limited.
'Menace' is a good-faith starting point, but a more complete version of this film would place waste workers, low-income residents, alongside the activists and vets. Their lives are not in opposition to the dogs the film cares about. Their experiences are, in fact, the full picture of what responsible dog management needs to solve. Recognising that is not a reason to abandon animal welfare. It is a reason to build an animal-welfare politics that does not stop at species boundaries.
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