Mauritius has announced a new programme to address its roaming-dog population through mass sterilisation, international veterinary support and new refuge facilities.
The announcement sounds encouraging. The government says it will work with an international team on a mass sterilisation programme, establish a refuge at Richelieu and develop regional facilities for stray and abandoned dogs. A veterinary school and animal hospital are also planned with financial support from India.
These are all measures that could move Mauritius towards a more humane and sustainable system. But a closer examination of government records, parliamentary answers and the country’s own audit findings shows that this is not the beginning of a new approach. It is another attempt to deliver a policy that has existed for several years but has repeatedly fallen short.
The official government announcement was made following a World Animal Day event at the Mauritius Society for Animal Welfare on 3 October 2026. It described sterilisation as the humane and sustainable response to the roaming-dog population and acknowledged that MSAW continues to face serious financial and staffing limitations.
What the announcement did not include was a start date, sterilisation target, budget or the identity of the international team. It also provided no opening date or capacity for the proposed refuge at Richelieu.
Those omissions are significant because Mauritius has made similar commitments before.
In May 2022, Cabinet approved a national dog-population-control project based on mass sterilisation, registration, microchipping and Catch-Neuter-Release. The plan was supposed to begin with a survey establishing how many unsterilised and unowned dogs were living across the country. Local and international providers would then be invited to implement the programme throughout the island. That promised survey was never completed.
Mauritius is still relying on estimates produced in 2013, when the country was believed to have approximately 246,000 owned dogs and 57,000 roaming street dogs. Neither the ministry nor MSAW has conducted a proper national survey since then.
Without a current population estimate, the government cannot reliably establish how much sterilisation coverage has been achieved, whether the number of roaming dogs is rising or falling, or how many animals the new programme must reach before it can have a lasting effect.
The 2024–25 Director of Audit report examined what had been achieved under the existing programme. By September 2025, approximately Rs42 million had been spent and 24,202 dogs had been sterilised since the project began in 2022. That represented only around 10% of the estimated owned-dog population.
The results among roaming dogs were considerably smaller. Just 2,292 street dogs were reported sterilised between January 2023 and September 2025—equivalent to approximately 4% of the 2013 population estimate.
The audit described both the mass-sterilisation campaign and the Catch-Neuter-Return operation as unsuccessful at the scale required. It also found that MSAW did not have enough kennel space to process dogs continuously. Staff had to wait for one group of dogs to recover and be released before another group could be admitted.
It is evidence that the programmes were not delivered with enough capacity, coverage or reliable data to achieve their intended national purpose.
The newly announced refuge at Richelieu must also be viewed in this context.
Parliament was told in April 2026 that land at Riche Lieu had already been identified and that the ministry’s engineering department was working on the shelter’s design. When asked when dogs would begin moving into the proposed refuges, the minister could not provide a timetable.
There is also a history of earlier shelter plans failing to progress. Government approval for dog-shelter construction was obtained in September 2024, but the audit found that work had still not begun one year later. The Rs5 million allocated to the project was transferred to the Mauritius Cane Industry Authority.
The October announcement therefore does not mean that new shelter capacity is available. Richelieu remains a proposed facility without a published opening date, confirmed capacity or operating model.
The same is true of the proposed veterinary school and animal hospital. The project could eventually make an important contribution to veterinary capacity in Mauritius. Local reporting estimates its value at Rs2 billion and says that state land has been reserved at Fiveways, Belle-Rive. However, Indian authorities are still recruiting the consultant who will prepare the detailed project report. It is a long-term development rather than an immediate resource for the dogs currently being collected.
The available figures do show that Mauritius has moved away from routine Catch-and-Kill and is now producing predominantly non-lethal outcomes.
During the 12 months covered by a parliamentary answer published in July 2026, MSAW reportedly captured 3,790 street dogs. Of these, 1,966 were sterilised, microchipped, marked and released to the areas where they had been found. Another 1,486 were entrusted to volunteers and animal-welfare organisations for follow-up within their communities.
Approximately 160 dogs remained in MSAW facilities because of police proceedings, persistent aggressive behaviour or serious health conditions. A further 178 dogs were euthanised during the 2025–26 financial year.
These figures account for all 3,790 dogs. They indicate that more than 90% were either released or placed with volunteers and organisations, while just under 5% were euthanised.
There is nothing in these figures demonstrating mass population-control killing. The government says the 178 dogs killed were undertaken for veterinary reasons and in accordance with the Animal Welfare Act.
However, the published information does not explain what those veterinary reasons were. It does not distinguish between terminal illness, serious injury, infectious disease, behavioural decisions or other circumstances. Nor does it provide the number of animals that may have died in custody without being euthanised.
There is also very little information about what happened to the 1,486 dogs entrusted to volunteers and welfare organisations. It is unclear whether they entered permanent homes, remained as monitored community dogs or were transferred into private facilities. Their inclusion as an outcome is encouraging, but it is not the same as providing complete traceability.
The legal position is also more complicated than it first appears. Mauritius’s Animal Welfare Act allows a stray dog to be seized. An unregistered dog is then to be disposed of, but this wording does not automatically mean that the dog will be killed.
The Act defines disposal as selling, euthanising, exchanging, giving a dog away for adoption or as a gift, or releasing the dog under an approved Catch-Neuter-Release programme.
Euthanasia is therefore one legally available outcome, but it is not the only one.
The law also allows a dog to be disposed of after being seized for a third time, when found inside an airport, seaport or hospital compound, or when it has not been reclaimed and a veterinary surgeon approves the decision. Owners have only three days in which to claim a seized dog.
This short reclaim period becomes particularly relevant when dog registration remains so incomplete.
Compulsory registration began on 1 October 2025. One year later, MSAW reported that just over 38,000 dogs had been registered. When measured against the authority’s estimate of 246,000 owned dogs, that represents approximately 15% of the population.
The true percentage is uncertain because the population estimate is more than a decade old. Even so, the available figures suggest that a very large number of owned dogs remain outside the registration system and could be difficult to trace back to their families if they are collected.
Confidence in the published outcomes is further affected by governance problems inside MSAW.
In May 2026, Parliament was told that an internal inspection had found deficient recordkeeping, an absence of fully formalised operating procedures, weak traceability of animal-cruelty complaints and shortcomings in records covering dog registration, adoption, euthanasia and Catch-Neuter-Release.
The ministry’s own preliminary examination confirmed administrative and governance weaknesses. A formal inquiry and corrective reforms were promised, but no public outcome from that process has yet been located.
Mauritius is clearly trying to move towards a more humane model. Catch-Neuter-Release has replaced Catch-and-Kill as the stated policy, thousands of dogs have been sterilised and most of the captured dogs appearing in the latest figures received non-lethal outcomes. That progress should be recognised.
But announcements of future sterilisation, refuges and veterinary infrastructure cannot erase the findings of the government’s own audit. Mauritius still does not know how many roaming dogs it has. Its previous sterilisation programme did not reach sufficient scale. Existing kennel capacity has restricted CNR operations, shelter construction has been delayed and the body responsible for recording the outcomes has acknowledged serious administrative limitations.
For these reasons, Dog Desk Animal Action considers Watchlist the appropriate classification for Mauritius on our Global Stray Dog Crisis Map.
The evidence does not currently support a Crisis classification. There is no verified indication of mass killing, widespread lethal collection or dogs disappearing through the system on a scale that would justify that status.
The Watchlist classification reflects a different concern: Mauritius has adopted the language and principles of humane dog-population management, but the system required to deliver them remains incomplete.
The latest announcement could mark a genuine turning point. Whether it does will depend upon what happens after the speeches when the international team is identified, the population is properly counted, the refuge is built, the sterilisation programme reaches meaningful scale and every captured dog can be traced to a recorded outcome.
For now, Mauritius is moving in the right direction, but it has not yet shown that its plans have become a functioning national system.