Stray dogs in Meghalaya, 2026: 10,653 street dogs in the census and 2.5 lakh dogs in the state's own rabies plan, 166.9 bites for every 100 counted dogs, rabies deaths recorded as 1 and 4 in the national table and 11 and 16 by the state, 81 percent of Shillong's bites from pet dogs, a High Court PIL that went to the Supreme Court, a 2021 ban on killing dogs for meat, and a Rs 250 dog tag

Stray dogs in Meghalaya: the state's numbers on one page

Meghalaya is the state where the fewest counted dogs produce the most recorded bites per dog. Sixteen rows, from sixteen sources.

Two rows carry the weight. Meghalaya recorded 166.9 dog bites in 2024 for every 100 street dogs the census found, seven times India's 24.3 Rajya Sabha, Starred Question 190, and the state's own rabies plan counts about 2.5 lakh dogs, 24 times the census figure. Both cannot describe the same hills, and the rest of this report is about which office counted what.

How many stray dogs Meghalaya has: 10,653 in the census, 2.5 lakh in the rabies plan

Meghalaya's census count doubled in seven years and is still one of the smallest in India; the state's own plan works from a number twenty-four times larger.

Meghalaya had 10,653 stray dogs in the 20th Livestock Census of 2019, 99.1 percent more than the 5,350 of 2012, in the same years India's count fell 10.7 percent, and 3.3 dogs for every 1,000 people against the national 11.5 National Commission on Population. Only Lakshadweep, Manipur, Dadra and Nagar Haveli, Mizoram, Nagaland and Delhi recorded a lower rate. In 2012 just 5.4 percent of Meghalaya's street dogs were counted in urban areas, against 14.6 percent across India, and the 2019 census counted 2,344 stray cattle. The state's own State Action Plan for Dog Mediated Rabies Elimination works from a different order of magnitude: its epidemiology chapter says 'Meghalaya boasts a sizable dog population' of 2,56,972 dogs, 'including a substantial number of unrecorded stray dogs', and its vaccine chapter budgets for a 'Total dog population in Meghalaya: 2,50,293', of which 1,75,205 are to be vaccinated. The plan does not say how it counted or whether the figure includes owned dogs, which in Meghalaya, as the bite figures below show, matter more than strays. Shillong itself has no count: at the High Court hearing of March 2025 the municipal board recorded that 'No official census has been taken on the street dogs in Shillong'. Bengaluru, Mumbai and Chennai have run counts of their own; no Meghalaya town has. Bonbeno's street dog report explains how a census and an estimate diverge.

Dog bites and rabies: 17,784 bites in the national table, 19,000 by the state, and deaths counted four ways

Meghalaya's bite rate is among the highest in India, and its rabies deaths depend on which office is asked.

The IDSP table laid before the Lok Sabha gives Meghalaya 5,302 dog bite cases in 2022, 9,611 in 2023, 17,784 in 2024 and 2,466 in January 2025 alone, a rise of 235.4 percent in two years and 526.3 bites per lakh people in 2024 against India's 265.7. Of the states only Sikkim at 1,237.6, Goa at 1,088.8, Tamil Nadu at 623.2, Gujarat at 542.8 and Karnataka at 530.7 recorded a higher rate; Maharashtra's was 381.1 and Kerala's 320.3. Set against the census, Meghalaya recorded 166.9 bites in 2024 for every 100 street dogs counted, the highest of any state, against Tamil Nadu's 108.9, Kerala's 39.7, Maharashtra's 38.0 and India's 24.3; only the union territory of Dadra and Nagar Haveli and Daman and Diu is higher. A ratio above one bite per dog is not dogs biting twice; it is a census that missed most of the dogs, and, in Meghalaya, bites by dogs that are not strays at all. The state's figure is close to the table's: in September 2025 the NRCP district nodal officer said 'Meghalaya reports over 19,000 dog-bite cases annually, with more than 5,000 from East Khasi Hills'. Bonbeno's dog bite report prints the IDSP series for every state.

East Khasi Hills: 10,460 bites in 2025, and four in five from pet dogs

East Khasi Hills, the district that holds Shillong, recorded 10,460 dog bite cases in 2025 and 7,447 up to August 2026; pet dogs accounted for 81 percent of reported bites in 2026 and stray dogs for 19 percent, a pet share that rose 'from 67 per cent in 2024 to 80 per cent in 2025 and 81 per cent in 2026', while the urban share of bites fell from 81 percent in 2023 to 65 percent in 2026. The Deputy Commissioner, Abhilash Baranwal, put it plainly: 'Eighty-one per cent of the dog-bite cases in the district are from pet dogs'. He added that 'many cases also go unreported'. The district's 10,460 for one year is more than half the state's 'over 19,000', and larger than the IDSP's whole-state figure for 2023. No district-wise table for the other eleven districts was found published. Meghalaya is the one state in this series where the official answer to 'whose dog bit me' is, most of the time, a neighbour's.

Rabies deaths: 1 and 4 in the table, 11 and 16 by the state

The IDSP table records Meghalaya's suspected rabies deaths as 0 in 2022, 1 in 2023 and 4 in 2024. The state's rabies plan records 'only two rabies cases reported in 2019 followed by a commendable period of zero reported cases from 2020 to 2022' and then 'a notable increase in 2023, with 11 reported cases'. On 26 September 2024 the IDSP State Surveillance Officer, Dr Valarie Laloo, said that 'of 27 cases of rabies death, 11 were reported last year and 16 till September, this year', with West Khasi Hills and West Jaintia Hills the worst districts at six each, and '96 per cent of the rabies deaths were due to dog bites'. A year later the NRCP district nodal officer counted '15 deaths already this year'. All four counts are printed; none is preferred. Even the table's four deaths in 2024 are 1.2 per 10 lakh people, about 30 times India's 54 deaths on 139.9 crore people, the highest rate per head of any state in that column; on the state's sixteen the gap is wider still. The ICMR estimates 5,726 rabies deaths a year in India against the 54 the national table recorded. The state answered with the plan, launched on World Rabies Day 2024, which declared anti-rabies vaccine and serum essential drugs and moved its model anti-rabies clinics to civil hospitals; Meghalaya, like Tamil Nadu and Mizoram, wrote its state plan from the national template.

The Meghalaya High Court: 'biter dogs', a shelter for 20, and a PIL sent to the Supreme Court

For ten months the state's own High Court ran Meghalaya's stray dog policy order by order, and then handed the file to Delhi.

On 27 November 2024 Chief Justice I.P. Mukerji and Justice W. Diengdoh, hearing PIL No. 4 of 2024, Kaustav Paul v. State of Meghalaya, took 'judicial notice of the fact that street dogs are increasing in number and pose a menace to the public. The cases of dog bites and deaths caused by rabies are sizeable in number'; the Shillong Municipal Board said its staff 'capture the dogs from the road, vaccinate and sterilize them. Thereafter, they are released on the road again', and the court held there was 'absolute need for the Board to acquire a shelter'. On 10 February 2025 it told the board to complete a dog shelter home 'within 30 days'; in March the board said the state had lent it an animal shelter at Upper Shillong for two months that 'would only hold 20 dogs'. On 15 May 2025 the court extended the writ 'throughout Meghalaya' and ordered the state to form, within four weeks, the committee that rule 4 of the Animal Birth Control (Dogs) Rules, 2001 requires, after the petitioner argued the rules 'have remained a piece of paper and not enforced'. In July it ordered committees in South Garo Hills and West Jaintia Hills, the two districts without one, and on 6 August 2025 the state reported committees in every district and that 'The registration of pet dogs is also being carried out'.

The 'biter dogs' order and the transfer to the Supreme Court

On 30 August 2025 the court wrote that 'in this State there is peculiarly distinctiveness in the menace posed by stray dogs', that 'quite a number of stray street dogs are biter dogs and very vicious in nature', and that it had directed such dogs to be 'inoculated, vaccinated medically attended to and then kept in shelters for observation before setting them free'; it asked its Registrar General to seek the Supreme Court's leave to keep the PIL. The trigger was paragraph 36 of the Supreme Court's order of 22 August 2025, which transferred every High Court's stray dog petition to itself and restored release after sterilisation for healthy dogs nationally. On 26 September 2025, on the state's own application, Acting Chief Justice H.S. Thangkhiew and Justice W. Diengdoh recalled the August order and directed that 'the records of the instant PIL (PIL No.4 of 2024) be transmitted by the Registry of this Court to the Registry of the Supreme Court at the earliest' Bar and Bench, 'Meghalaya High Court…. The orders that now govern Meghalaya are the Supreme Court's: 22 August 2025, 7 November 2025 on schools, hospitals and stations, and 19 May 2026, which upheld those directions. No later Meghalaya High Court order on stray dogs was found. No Meghalaya scheme or court order fixing compensation for a dog bite was found either, unlike Haryana's Rs 10,000 a tooth mark or Karnataka's Rs 5,000 a bite.

The Animal Birth Control programme: no published count, twelve centres budgeted, and eleven NGOs without a vet

Meghalaya sterilises dogs, by the Shillong Municipal Board's word, but nobody has published how many.

The Shillong Municipal Board told the High Court in November 2024 that it vaccinates and sterilises the dogs it catches and returns them to the road, but no sterilisation total for Shillong, any district or the state could be found published, and the Animal Welfare Board released no ABC grant to any state in the four years to 2024-25. The state's rabies plan budgets 'ABC cum animal shelter' centres at '1 per district @ Rs 12 lakhs per center', twelve in all for Rs 1.44 crore, inside a total of Rs 11,73,94,480, with Rs 2.00 crore for 2,00,235 doses of dog vaccine at Rs 100 a dose; whether any of the twelve has opened is not recorded. The same plan lists eleven animal welfare organisations working on rabies, three in East Khasi Hills and eight in West Jaintia Hills, each marked 'Not yet registered with AWBI', and notes: 'None of the NGOs have a veterinarian in their organization'. The Centre's advisory sets 70 percent coverage: 7,457 dogs on the census count, 1,75,205 on the plan's, a target twenty-three times larger. On 1 September 2026 East Khasi Hills launched a pilot of its own rabies elimination plan in Laban, Shillong: vaccinate the area's stray dogs first, then sterilise them, with feeding confined to zones the community picks, to be extended to the rest of Shillong and then to rural areas; in one early-morning exercise officials vaccinated seven stray dogs.

The dog meat ban: a 2021 order, and dogs still found in gunny bags

Meghalaya banned killing dogs for meat in 2021, and the order still stands where Nagaland's did not.

On 9 September 2021 Meghalaya's Animal Husbandry and Veterinary Department ordered that 'the killing of stray dogs or domesticated dogs and slaughtering of dogs for meat is prohibited in the state of Meghalaya', citing section 11 of the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act, 1960 and sections 428 and 429 of the Indian Penal Code. Nagaland's 2020 ban on the commercial sale of dog meat was set aside by the Gauhati High Court's Kohima Bench in 2023, as Bonbeno's Assam report records; no court challenge to Meghalaya's order was found. In September 2023 'at least a dozen dogs' packed in gunny bags were found in a car in 'a reserve forest in Songkama, East Garo Hills', and one person was held. No state count of dog meat cases or rescues was found published.

Veterinary care: 449 vets, almost no vacancies, four hospitals and no college

Meghalaya has twice India's vets for its people, but almost nowhere to operate on a dog and nowhere to train a vet.

Meghalaya had 449 registered veterinary practitioners on 31 March 2024, up from 402 in 2021, and only 3 of its 262 sanctioned government veterinary doctor posts were vacant in December 2025, 1.1 percent against 25.8 percent for India. That is 13.3 vets per lakh people against India's 6.3, more than Maharashtra's 8.8 or Karnataka's 7.5, and 4,541 livestock per vet against 6,106. But of its 251 government veterinary institutions only 4 are hospitals or polyclinics; 126 are dispensaries and 121 are aid centres, and each serves 8,124 livestock against India's 7,906. Its 17 operational mobile veterinary units give 0.8 per lakh livestock, and Meghalaya has no recognised veterinary college, one of eleven states and union territories without one, with Delhi, Goa, Sikkim and Manipur. A state with 2,344 stray cattle and an estimated 2.5 lakh dogs trains none of its own vets. Bonbeno's Vet Access Index ranks every state on the same arithmetic. Bonbeno's vet directories cover eight cities (Mumbai, Delhi, Bengaluru, Chennai, Hyderabad, Pune, Kolkata and Ahmedabad), none in the North East, so an owner in Shillong works from the government list; what a consultation or surgery costs elsewhere is in Bonbeno's guide to what a vet visit costs in India.

Pets and the rules: a Rs 250 Shillong tag, the Rangbah Shnong, and owners who face an FIR

Meghalaya is the one state in this series where pet rules are written around the finding that pets do most of the biting.

Since 2021 every dog owner in Shillong has been 'required to compulsorily register their animals with the Shillong Municipal Board', and the rule was given teeth in November 2024: under section 128 of the Meghalaya Municipal Act 'all residents within the Shillong Municipal Area are required to register their Pet Dogs with the Shillong Municipal Board' and obtain a dog tag for Rs 250, and 'Dogs found without tags will be treated as strays'. How many dogs carry the tag has not been published. The East Khasi Hills pilot of September 2026 adds the village and locality headman: 'pet owners would be required to mandatorily register their pets with the respective Rangbah Shnong and maintain proper vaccination records', and owners who break the norms face fines, penalties and, where applicable, an FIR under section 125 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita. The state's rabies plan goes further and proposes a law making registration, vaccination and sterilisation of dogs compulsory, 'the failure of which will attract penalty and/or even jail to pet owners'; it had not been enacted by November 2026. Bonbeno's guide to dog registration in India covers the portals that exist, and its guide to pets in apartments in India reads the rules residents' associations work under.

Pet shops, native breeds and end of life

The plan asks that 'All pet breeding shops dealing in supply, breeding and import of pets/ exotic pets from outside the State should register with competent authorities'; the Pet Shop Rules already require a State Board certificate, the Animal Welfare Board's circular of December 2023 recorded that states had not reported their counts, and no Meghalaya figure was found. No dog breed named for Meghalaya is on the register of Indian breeds, and the dog most of the state shares a road with is the Indian pariah dog; Bonbeno's report on the register carries the registered breeds, and its KCI registrations report shows what owners register with the Kennel Club of India. No pet crematorium or cemetery in Meghalaya was found; the copy of the Centre's carcass disposal guidelines that India reads online is, as it happens, hosted by Meghalaya's own Animal Husbandry and Veterinary Department. Bonbeno's cremation report and its guide to when your pet dies in India cover the steps.

What a Meghalaya pet owner can do with these numbers

Seven things that follow from the record, in the order an owner meets them.

1. Tag your dog in Shillong. Rs 250 at the Shillong Municipal Board; an untagged dog is treated as a stray.
2. Register it with your Rangbah Shnong if your locality is in the pilot, and keep the vaccination card. Laban first, the rest of Shillong next.
3. Vaccinate your own dog every year. Four in five bites in East Khasi Hills are from pet dogs, and owners can face an FIR.
4. After any bite, finish the whole anti-rabies course. The vaccine is an essential drug in Meghalaya's public hospitals.
5. Report a stray or dangerous dog in Shillong on 8787586387. The municipal helpline.
6. Call the police if you see dogs being caught for meat. Killing or slaughtering any dog is prohibited by the 2021 order.
7. Know which order applies where you live. Institutional premises are cleared to shelters; a residential road gets its sterilised dogs back under rule 11(19).

What this data does not measure

Each figure here was produced by a different office for a different purpose, and the gaps in a small state are wide.

• The dog counts disagree by a factor of 24. The census counted 10,653 street dogs in 2019; the state's plan gives 2,56,972, 2,50,293 and 2,50,000 in three places without a method or a split between owned and street dogs. The 21st Livestock Census had published no state table by 11 November 2026.
• The bite and death series are different instruments. The IDSP table counts what reporting facilities send up; the state's 'over 19,000' is a spoken round figure; the East Khasi Hills series is one district's. The IDSP's 1 and 4 deaths sit beside the state's 11 and 16. The dataset computes nothing across them.
• East Khasi Hills' 2026 figure is EastMojo's 7,447. The Shillong Times reported 'more than 7,500' the same day and could not be opened; a social media post giving a far lower figure is not used. Highland Post's 'more than 90,000 dog bite cases' in 2024 is not used because the period it covers could not be established.
• No sterilisation total and no ABC centre count for any Meghalaya town or district was found, and whether any of the plan's twelve budgeted centres has opened is not recorded.
• No compensation rule, no pet shop count, no registration total and no pet crematorium were found. The 2021 dog meat order is read from The Sentinel's report; the order itself was not found online.
• What happened to the High Court's PIL in the Supreme Court is not recorded separately. Its directions on 'biter dogs' are printed as orders of the Meghalaya High Court, not as law now in force.
• Pet spending per household is absent because the Household Consumption Expenditure Survey's unit-level data had not been obtained. The Statesman, The Shillong Times and PETA India's rescue pages could not be opened and are not used.

How this report was built

Every figure was read from the document cited, and the state rows are the same rows Bonbeno's national reports computed from the parliamentary annexes.

1. The census figures are from the Rajya Sabha statement of 6 August 2025 and Table 79 of the 19th Livestock Census, with per-1,000 rates from the National Commission on Population's projections; the plan's dog counts, budget and NGO list from the State Action Plan, read with pypdf.
2. The bite and rabies figures are from Annexure I and II to the Lok Sabha reply of 1 April 2025, the State Action Plan, Syllad, Highland Post, the state press releases of 26 September 2025 and 1 September 2026 Office of the Deputy Commissioner, EastMojo, The Sentinel, the NCDC plan and the WHO India page.
3. The court record is from the Meghalaya High Court's orders of 27 November 2024, 15 May 2025, 30 August 2025 and 26 September 2025, read with pypdf High Court of Meghalaya, PIL No. 4 of 2024 High Court of Meghalaya, PIL No. 4 of 2024 High Court of Meghalaya, LiveLaw, The Sentinel The Sentinel, 'Meghalaya HC Orders Urgent…, NE News, Bar and Bench, the Supreme Court's orders Supreme Court of India and News On AIR.
4. The programme, dog meat and veterinary figures are from the Lok Sabha reply of 2 December 2025, PIB, the ABC Rules, The Sentinel, India Today NE, the Lok Sabha replies Lok Sabha, Unstarred Question 1287 Lok Sabha, Unstarred Question 4449, the Rajya Sabha annexure and the VCI list.
5. The pet figures are from the state government order of 16 February 2021, India Today NE, the state press release of 13 June 2025, the Pet Shop Rules, the AWBI circular and the carcass guidelines. The People Also Ask questions were captured on 11 November 2026 through Apify runs of Google's India mobile results; the focus keyword, 'dog bite cases in meghalaya' and 'stray dogs in shillong' returned no box, so the questions come from 'rabies in meghalaya', 'stray dogs north east india', 'dog bite in shillong' and 'pet dog registration shillong'.