Stray dogs at the centre of a growing social divide Premium

Telangana faces a crisis as mass killings of stray dogs highlight a growing social divide between community safety and animal welfare.

On the languorous Sunday morning before Republic Day 2026, life at Yacharam — about 50 kilometres from Hyderabad — moved at its usual pace. Farmers tended to their fields and cattle, old and retired men debated politics on the roadside over hot cups of chai, and dogs dozed in patches of winter sun, spent from their nocturnal wanderings.

The ordinariness of the scene, however, was deceptive. There were no signs to suggest that the village, just days ago, had issued a death sentence.

Five days earlier, Yacharam had been thrust into the headlines as the epicentre of an alleged mass killing of stray dogs. While animal welfare activists spoke of nearly 100 strays being wiped out, police recovered 37 carcasses, enough to confirm that something systematic and merciless had unfolded in just a few hours.

Outside the Panchayat building, under renovation, a larger-than-life poster of newly elected sarpanch Masku Anita Saranam, with her husband beside her, smiles down at the village. A first-time elected representative to a post reserved for Scheduled Caste women, she now finds herself at the centre of the controversy. Along with Panchayat secretary Kishan Naik, she has been named as co-accused in the complaint lodged at Yacharam police station in connection with the mass killing of stray dogs.

Details of the sordid tale emerge only in fragments, stitched together from villagers’ accounts. Hired killing squads allegedly went from street to street, shooting poisoned darts at the dogs. After brief convulsions, the animals died.

A villager, speaking on the condition of anonymity, claims that nearly 70 dogs were killed in this manner, in a matter of a few hours.