Image used for representation
| Photo Credit: N. Sridharan
A writ petition has been filed in the Madras High Court challenging the Greater Chennai Corporation’s (GCC) insistence on obtaining licences for all pet dogs in the city before November 24, besides making it compulsory to muzzle such dogs whenever they are taken to public places for a walk or other purposes.
Justice V. Lakshminarayanan on Friday (November 14, 2025)adjourned the hearing on the plea to November 25 and directed GCC counsel A. Arun Babu to obtain instructions by then on all concerns raised by People for Cattle in India, an NGO that had filed the case for framing humane, proportionate, and evidence-based regulations.
When the judge wanted to know how many pet dogs could possibly be there in the whole of Chennai and how many had got registered till now, the counsel replied that the civic body expects the total number of pet dogs within its territory to be around one lakh, and that 31,000 dogs had got registered till now.
Expressing doubts if there could be only one lakh pet dogs in the entire city, the judge said: “I myself have three dogs at home.” Even going by the figures submitted by the counsel, he wondered whether the GCC would be able to complete registration of 69,000 dogs before the cut-off date of November 24.
To this, the counsel replied that the corporation had been registering about 5,000 dogs a day and that the web portal had crashed for only one day when the registration process was hampered. He also said, the GCC would take a call on extending the time limit after assessing the number of applications received till November 24.
When the petitioner’s counsel B. Prashanth Nadaraj complained about the insistence on muzzling pet dogs in public places, the judge said: “I do muzzle my dogs whenever I take them out for a walk because once, my labrador, considered to be a docile animal, ended up biting an advocate during his morning walk.”
However, when the counsel said, it would be difficult to muzzle some breeds such as bulldogs, the judge said that issue would be considered on the next date of hearing after Mr. Babu obtains instructions from the GCC on all issues that had been raised in the writ petition.
Question of fostering
The judge also told the GCC counsel that some people may keep dogs in their custody only for a limited period of time until those animals get adopted by someone else. He wanted to know whether such individuals, who provide temporary shelter, should also get the dogs registered.
In its affidavit, the NGO wondered how the GCC could restrict issuance of pet dog licences to only four for every individual and said, the regulations do not carve out any explicit exemption for rescue organisations, foster care providers, and rehabilitative custodians who handle injured, abandoned, and sick animals.
Stating the petitioner NGO had rescued four labradors, one dachshund, and one mixed-breed pup abandoned in Chennai in the last 10 days, the NGO said, the spike in the number of dogs being abandoned could be because of the proposed fine of ₹5,000 that the GCC contemplates to levy on owners of unlicensed dogs.
Published – November 14, 2025 02:50 pm IST
