Animal lovers protest botched up surgeries in Corporation-run pound

Sai Vignesh, one of the organisers, said that the rally started from the Basin Bridge railway station and ended at the Animal Birth Control (ABC) Centre run by the Greater Chennai Corporation. “Last week, while we were visiting the Corporation-run pound in Basin Bridge, we saw that the surgeries performed on the dogs were poorly done, with the animals suffering due to this,” he said. 

“According to ABC (Dogs) Amendment Rules 2010, any person can visit the pound. But we were not allowed by the guards to enter it,” he said, adding that the team will take legal recourse, if no action is taken. 

Another organiser Jayanth said that the residents too joined the rally. “With the help of flyers, we explained what’s happening to the stray dogs in the pound to the residents from the locality. We told people that the surgeries are botched up and the pound has bad standards. We staged the protest outside the pound but we were not allowed by the guards. We had close to 30 volunteers and a petition too was submitted to the Corporation Commissioner. The ABC (Dogs) Amendment Rules 2010 specify that the birth control surgery should be done in the presence of an NGO working with animal rights. We want to ensure that the authorities do this, as per protocol,” he explained. A census by the Corporation in 2014 revealed that there are 82,457 stray dogs in the city.