The fate of eleven more dogs at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras changed on October 28 as they were moved out of the institute's on-campus shelter — where they had fallen ill — by animal rights activists.
Last Friday, three dogs were similarly moved out of the campus for better care and treatment. When an Edexlive reporter visited the dogs that were moved to the hospital — the severely malnourished dogs were traumatised to a point that one even started trembling with fear at the sound of a human voice. Activists told The Hindu that 14 dogs in total have been taken out as per directions of the Madras High Court in an ongoing public interest litigation regarding the handling of community dogs by the IIT Madras administration. Around two weeks ago, Health Minister Ma Subramanian had inspected the shelter. IIT Madras administration had acknowledged during the inspection by the Minister that 56 out of the 188 dogs kept in the shelter had died in the past one year.
Meanwhile, Citizens for Animal Rights, a Delhi-based organisation that was one of the petitioners in a litigation in Supreme Court concerning community dogs, wrote to IIT Madras Registrar, urging that the dogs be released from the shelter. Rishi Dev, director of the organisation, said the confinement and treatment of these dogs went against the judgment of the Supreme Court. “There is precedence where Supreme Court took cognizance of such violations. We have told the IIT Madras Registrar that we will be initiating contempt proceedings if it did not take action as per the Supreme court judgment,” he said .
