A routine act putting food out for the dogs that live around campus — has spiralled into a formal regulatory complaint at one of Bengaluru’s oldest veterinary institutions.
At the centre of the row is a simple question: who gets to decide where community dogs are fed, and on whose terms? The Sahavarthin Animal Welfare Trust says the answer coming from Hebbal Veterinary College has been intimidation. The college’s Dean says it’s simply about order and safety.
What the Trust Is Alleging
According to Sahavarthin, feeders who aren’t affiliated with the college as students have been turned away at the gate entirely. In one instance, the group says, a student who continued feeding dogs on campus was warned that disciplinary proceedings could follow.
The trust hasn’t limited its response to public statements. It has taken the matter formally to multiple state bodies, arguing in its complaints that the college’s conduct runs afoul of both animal welfare law and waste management regulations — a combination that, if substantiated, would put the institution on the wrong side of two separate regulatory frameworks at once.
The College Tells a Different Story
Dean Dr R. Nagaraja rejects the framing entirely. Nobody was barred and nobody was threatened, he maintains — what actually happened, he says, is that feeders were asked to stick to specific, designated spots on campus, a request he ties directly to safety considerations and to the Supreme Court’s recent guidance on managing stray dogs.
That’s not a small distinction. Recent Supreme Court directions and the Animal Birth Control Rules have pushed hard toward exactly this kind of zoning — structured, agreed-upon feeding locations rather than feeding wherever a volunteer chooses. Institutions citing that framework to justify restrictions are, at least on paper, operating within a legally sanctioned playbook. Whether Hebbal applied it fairly is precisely what’s now in dispute.
Not the First Time Bengaluru’s Feeders Have Faced This
Sahavarthin isn’t a newcomer to this fight. The organisation, which also works with Bengaluru’s civic body BBMP on animal welfare awareness, has previously documented widespread hostility toward its network of feeders the overwhelming majority of them women — ranging from having their photographs taken and circulated without consent to being blamed outright for dog bite incidents they had nothing to do with, even while operating strictly within permitted rules.
That history matters here, because it frames the Hebbal complaint not as an isolated flashpoint but as one more entry in a pattern the trust says it’s been fighting for years.
A Second Complaint Hiding Behind the First
The dispute isn’t only about access. Sahavarthin’s complaint also flags what it calls poor waste management on the Hebbal campus, along with animal carcasses left unaddressed — conditions the trust argues are themselves drawing more strays to the area in the first place.
That claim, if true, complicates the college’s stated safety rationale considerably: an institution citing stray dog concentration as a reason to restrict feeders would be on shakier ground if its own waste handling is part of what’s attracting the animals to begin with.
The Bigger Pattern This Case Sits Inside
Strip away the specifics and this is a version of a conflict playing out across Indian campuses, apartment complexes, and neighbourhoods: institutions wanting fewer visible strays, and volunteers insisting they’re doing legally protected work that shouldn’t require permission from anyone standing at a gate.
The way out, in most of these disputes, ends up looking like what Nagaraja is describing — clearly marked, mutually agreed feeding zones rather than case-by-case gatekeeping. Whether Hebbal’s version of that actually matches its practice on the ground is now a question for the state authorities Sahavarthin has approached, not something either side is likely to resolve on its own.
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