FOR almost as long as Pakistan has existed, the state has had one answer to stray dogs: kill them. Poison and bullets have been the tools, and rabies control the justification. Yet after decades of culling, dogs still roam our streets, bite cases keep coming, and children still die of a disease that is entirely preventable.
That contradiction is now being argued in court, and the arguments are producing something larger than a verdict on dogs. Over the past two years, our courts have begun to treat the welfare of animals as a constitutional question. Pakistan may be witnessing the birth of a new branch of law.
There is a precedent for this. Environmental law in Pakistan was shaped less by legislation than by judges, who recognised that the right to life under Article 9 means more than bare survival and includes the right to a healthy environment. Driven in large part by the work of Dr Parvez Hassan in the Shehla Zia case, that jurisprudence turned ecology into a matter of fundamental rights. Animal law is now following the same path, and for similar reasons.
The World Health Organisation is clear that dog-mediated rabies is eliminated by vaccinating dogs, not by killing them. Mass vaccination, combined with humane population control through trap-neuter-vaccinate-return (TNVR), breaks the chain of transmission. Culling does not: it leaves gaps that unvaccinated dogs quickly fill, so the population and the disease both bounce back. Punjab recognised as much when it adopted an Animal Birth Control (TNVR) Policy. The trouble is that municipal authorities kept on culling anyway.
Animal law is not simply about preventing cruelty, but also about public health, biodiversity and good governance.
That gap between policy and practice is what brought Eiraj Hassan vs Government of Punjab, which one of us filed, to the Lahore High Court. The petition secured interim protection against illegal culling across the province, followed by directions that the policy be implemented in letter and spirit. The argument was taken further in Nelofar vs Chief Commissioner ICT, where principles of humane population management and animal sentience were developed. Read alongside the Islamabad High Court’s recognition of animal sentience in the Kaavan case, these rulings form an emerging body of law that treats animals as living beings whose welfare is bound with the health of society, not as property or pests.
The constitutional basis is not hard to find. Articles 9, 9A and 14 protect life and dignity, and our courts have long held that environmental degradation and threats to public health can violate both. Animal welfare belongs in the same frame. Wildlife trafficking, inhumane food systems, badly managed animal populations and the spread of zoonotic disease all bear directly on human health. The global public health community calls this ‘One Health’: the well-being of people, animals and the environment cannot be separated. The pandemic taught that lesson at enormous cost.
There is also a public safety argument. Decades of criminological research show that cruelty to animals frequently coexists with domestic violence, child abuse, and other violent crime. Violence against the powerless rarely stays confined to one kind of victim. A legal system that takes animal cruelty seriously is better placed to protect vulnerable people too. Animal rights do not compete with human rights; they reinforce them.
Dogs are only the beginning. Public interest petitions have since been filed over illegally imported monkeys, lions kept in circuses and private zoos, endangered black bears used for entertainment, the condition of farm animals, regulation of animal carts, and the enforcement of slaughter laws, where better practice serves both animal welfare and the containment of zoonotic disease. Each case makes the same point in a different setting: animal law is not simply about preventing cruelty, but also about public health, biodiversity, and good governance.
The groundwork outside the courtroom matters as much. In January 2025, Pakistan’s first International Animal and Environmental Rights Conference brought more than 700 judges, lawyers, academics and activists together with international organisations working in the field. It treated animal law not as a matter of charity but as a serious legal discipline. Kinnaird College in Lahore now teaches courses on animal rights law and food legal systems, and a new generation of lawyers is taking up this work.
But courts can only go so far. Judgements set principles; governments must turn them into practice. Punjab, which already has the right policy on paper, should fund TNVR programmes properly, train municipal staff, and hold officials accountable when culling continues in defiance of court orders. Other provinces and the federal capital should follow. Legislators should look again at a cruelty law that dates back to 1890 and at the patchy regulation of zoos, circuses and the wildlife trade. Universities and bar associations should keep building the expertise that litigation alone cannot supply.
If that happens, the past two years may be remembered not merely as a run of important cases, but as the moment Pakistan’s legal system began to take animals seriously. Environmental law changed how we understand our relationship with nature. Animal law can do the same for our relationship with the creatures we share it with. A society that protects its most vulnerable living beings is, in the end, a more just society for everyone in it.
Altamush Saeed is a lawyer who holds an LLM in animal law & environmental law and teaches animal law and food law at Kinnaird College, Lahore. Eiraj Hassan is a social media manager for the PSL at the Pakistan Cricket Board.
Published in Dawn, October 9th, 2026
