In the early 19th century, Mumbai, then called Bombay, found itself in a huge crisis. The city's streets were taken over by stray dogs.
In 1932, concerned with public health and rabies, the colonial administrators of the city decided that a large-scale dog culling process should be undertaken.
The barbarity of these killings shocked the citizens of Bombay, particularly those who lived in the middle-class parts of the city. The residents of Bombay felt that stray dogs were a natural part of urban ecologies.
Among them were some of the city's most prominent citizens, such as civic reformers and journalists, who protested the move by the British rulers.
Citizens of Bombay argued that the lethality of the extermination of stray dogs was inhumane and that dogs deserved a more humane treatment.
These people, opposed to the government’s idea, pasted up leaflets, wrote editorials in newspapers and journals, and they also organised public meetings. Their concern for stray dogs quickly transformed into an organised protest throughout the city.
The agitation was one of the first organised public protests to take place in Bombay's modern history. The citizens of the city petitioned colonial authorities to consider vaccinations and do what they could to create animal shelters, rather than slaughterhouse degradation.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the citizens of Bombay were able to persuade some members of the colonial government to make this more humane approach official.
Eventually, this resulted in methods of stray dog management, furiously opposed by senior public health officials and public stakeholder representatives, including the development of dog pounds and the administration of anti-rabies vaccinations.
The Bombay Dog Riots led directly into animal welfare movements in India, including the first societies to protect both stray and domestic animals in the 1920s and 1930s.
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