Does India's animal welfare jurisprudence suffer from inconsistency in its treatment of different species? Analyse with reference to recent Supreme Court orders.

India's animal-welfare law rests on the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act, 1960, which defines "animal" as any living creature other than a human being [1]. Yet recent Supreme Court orders on a temple elephant and on street dogs show consideration varying sharply by species — an inconsistency real in outcome, though largely statutory rather than arbitrary.

Where the inconsistency appears

• Individual vs aggregate: In Jayakrishna Menon vs Krishnankutty (9 June 2026), a Division Bench held courts "cannot be a mute spectator", found the caretaker in contempt for deploying Raman — Keralam's tallest elephant — in temple rituals despite an undertaking, and ordered State custody [3].
• Contrast the stray-dog matter, where the Court's 11 August 2025 order directed that roughly a million Delhi-NCR dogs be picked up and sheltered, later expanded pan-India with fencing of schools, hospitals and bus stands within eight weeks [4].
• Charisma and ownership bias: a named, owned, Schedule-I elephant receives bespoke, judicially supervised protection; ownerless dogs are managed as a population problem.
• Uneven statutory anchors: elephants attract the Wildlife (Protection) Act, 1972 alongside the PCA Act; dogs rest on the ABC Rules, 2023, whose catch-neuter-vaccinate-release mandate depends on under-capacitated municipalities and AWBI-recognised agencies [2].

Why divergence is not purely arbitrary

• Competing interests: rabies risk and child safety weigh in the dog case; captive-elephant welfare raises no comparable public-health claim.
• Remedial capacity: custody of one animal is directly enforceable; population management needs administrative machinery courts cannot supply.
• Self-correction: the August 2025 order was modified on 22 August 2025 to release sterilised and immunised dogs into their territory, realigning with the ABC Rules [4] — course-correction, not settled bias.

The divergence is thus one of remedy and feasibility more than of moral principle, yet outcomes differ enough to invite the charge of arbitrariness. Equal consideration of interests — the ethical core of Article 51A(g)'s duty of compassion — is best secured by strengthening AWBI oversight [1], financing municipal sterilisation and shelter infrastructure [2], and codifying a uniform welfare standard, so protection turns on the capacity to suffer rather than species charisma.