During the early hours of a pleasant Bengaluru morning, a woman rides on her scooter with two large boxes of food, a large can of water, and cut-up sheets of banana leaves. As she rides, dogs on the road begin chasing her, running as fast as they can to keep up. She remains unshaken, slowly stops on the side of the road, away from houses and human traffic. She stops her scooter and turns around to see the happy, wagging tails running toward her, waiting for their first meal and access to clean water in 24 hours.
She is not a municipal worker or a volunteer from an NGO; she is just one of the thousands of animal welfare workers in India, silently working behind the scenes to bridge the gap between a collapsing ecosystem and an ever-expanding city.
But this isn’t a story about dogs. It’s about what happens when development outruns compassion and infrastructure forgets coexistence. Across the country, the stray dog population isn’t growing because people are feeding more. It’s growing because our cities are growing faster than they can care.
With the increase in tech parks, lavish high-rise apartments, flyovers, and metro lines, Bangalore, once known as a Garden City, is now an expanding concrete jungle. The rapid pace of urbanisation continues to encroach on wildlife spaces.
While we all want to live in apartments with multiple facilities, we forget what it was built on -destruction. In 2023, I was residing in an apartment off Kanakapura Road, away from all the noise of city life. While it was truly a beautiful space, I experienced an unusual issue - monkeys. Having lived inside the city most of my life, this was a new encounter for me. The monkeys climbed up through the drain pipes, visited multiple apartment balconies, and picked off plants to eat. Soon, the residents complained, raised an issue to relocate the monkeys, and reported them as a nuisance to society. Out of convenience, it was forgotten that the homes they paid large sums of money to stay in were built on the homes that belonged to the monkeys.
Forests were cut down to accommodate the apartments, and all non-human beings were deemed problematic. Pigeons were blamed for dirty balconies, and dogs were blamed for simply existing in the same place they have for generations. To add fuel to the fire, lockdowns during the pandemic brought an abrupt halt to municipal animal birth control (ABC) efforts across the country. Existing populations of community dogs and cats were left unsterilised for years, and they adapted, multiplied, and survived.
Meanwhile, abandonment rates surged. Misinformation about virus transmission and financial issues pushed thousands of families to abandon their pets overnight. Dogs that were house-trained and dependent on humans were forced into survival.
In the span of 25 years, Bangalore has lost 70% of its tree cover, nearly 60% of all lakes, multiple wildlife corridors, and village greens - causing a drastic drop in frogs, butterflies, bees, and pollinators. Even jackals, civets, mongooses, and snakes were forced to disappear from urban memory.
Community animals didn’t multiply because they were protected. We encroached into their spaces and displaced them for urban development, while they were left to survive on exposed streets near uncollected garbage, squeezed into tighter territories, struggling to survive on water from dirty puddles and food from waste scraps found in unwashed and discarded plastic containers.
To prevent an unmanageable increase in community animal populations, and to ensure a healthy coexistence, we created silent heroes - the animal welfare workers. Some were fortunate to get the support of local municipalities, and some went without, but all of them worked towards creating a safer environment for everyone. Animals were vaccinated, spayed and neutered, given access to healthy food and clean water, and above all, treated with patience, kindness, and dignity.
Today, we face a new threat - a lack of urban compassion. Animals are run over by speeding vehicles, relocated and abandoned in unknown territories, beaten and abused for their existence. Hit with sticks and stones, chased down the road, ran over on purpose, poisoned, and left to die.
And yet, the people who stand beside them - the animal welfare organisations, community feeders, and caretakers - are increasingly vilified. They are targeted by media outlets, RWAs, and sections of the public who refuse to look deeper than the surface. Every single day, across the country, animal welfare workers face scrutiny, threats, physical harm, and emotional trauma. And still, they are the ones cleaning up the mess that our unchecked urbanisation has left behind.
I personally know multiple women in this space who are on the receiving end of threats not only to their lives but to the lives they protect. Struggling to make ends meet, they pour in their own money to care for the voiceless - raising funds from kind strangers, feeding community cats and dogs, paying out-of-pocket for medical care, vaccinations, sterilisation, treatment for injuries caused by vehicles or cruelty, and more.And this happens in every metro city. The faces we see on the street aren’t the cause. They’re the cost. And the bill is ours to pay.
The solution lies in designing cities where both humans and animals can coexist. We need better policies for managing animal populations, improved waste management, and more support for animal welfare workers who are already doing the hard work. We must choose compassion over convenience and coexistence over destruction. Only then can we ensure a future where all beings, human and animal alike, can thrive together.
Shweta Raman is a scuba diving instructor, photographer, and animal rescue volunteer based in Bangalore. With a background in sales and a deep commitment to compassionate coexistence, she’s currently working independently to counter harmful media narratives about community animals.