When Compassion Becomes a Punishable Offence - What Are We Teaching in Our Places of Learning?
There is something deeply unsettling about a notice that fines a student for feeding a hungry animal.
At Hooghly Women’s College, a ₹100 penalty now hangs over what is, at its core, an act of quiet human decency. Students are instructed not to feed stray dogs on campus, framed as a matter of safety and security.
On paper, it is administrative.
In reality, it raises a far bigger question: what kind of behaviour are we choosing to discourage?
A Pattern That Is Becoming Normal
This is not an isolated decision. Across India, similar notices have appeared
Lady Brabourne College imposed a ₹2,000 fine in 2018 before being forced to withdraw it after public backlash.
Kerala Veterinary University recently declared feeding stray dogs a punishable offence.
University of Mysore restricted feeding at Kukkarahalli Lake.
These decisions are increasingly tied to wider legal and policy shifts following a 2025 Supreme Court directive concerning stray dogs in public spaces.
Safety, hygiene, and liability are the language used. But beneath that language sits something more uncomfortable.
Compassion is being regulated.
The Logic and Its Limits
Let’s be clear: safety matters.
Dog bites happen. Poorly managed populations can create conflict. Institutions have a duty of care to students. But here is where the logic begins to fracture:
Feeding does not create the problem, unmanaged populations do.
Banning feeding does not remove dogs it often makes them more desperate, more territorial, and harder to manage.
Penalising kindness does nothing to address sterilisation, vaccination, or long-term solutions.
In many cases, feeding is the only point of human contact these animals have, the only stabilising influence in their environment.
Remove that, and you don’t create safety. You create instability.
When Compassion Is Treated as Misconduct
What makes this trend particularly troubling is where it is happening. Colleges. Universities. Places of learning.
These are institutions that shape not just knowledge, but values. And yet the message being sent is clear:
See suffering. Walk past it. Or be fined.
At the same time, we are witnessing similar attitudes elsewhere.
In Turkey, a doctor recently came under fire simply for sharing his lunch with a stray dog. A doctor. In a profession built on care, empathy, and the preservation of life, an act of kindness became controversial.
It forces a difficult question, If compassion is unwelcome in places of healing, and punishable in places of learning where exactly is it supposed to exist?
The False Divide: Safety vs Humanity
The framing of this issue as a binary, safety versus compassion is misleading.
It does not have to be one or the other. Effective, humane solutions already exist:
Structured feeding zones
Coordinated sterilisation and vaccination (ABC programmes)
Community-managed dog populations
Education on safe interaction
These approaches recognise a simple truth, You cannot solve a welfare issue by removing empathy from the equation.
What We Are Really Teaching
Policies like this do more than control behaviour. They teach.
They teach young people how to respond to vulnerability. They teach what is acceptable in public life. They teach whether kindness is something to be encouraged or quietly suppressed.
And right now, the lesson is becoming increasingly clear:
Compassion is inconvenient. Control is preferable.
A Line That Should Not Be Crossed
There is a difference between managing a situation and erasing humanity from it. A student feeding a stray dog is not a threat to society. It is a reflection of it.
If that reflection makes institutions uncomfortable, the solution is not to fine the student. It is to ask why compassion has become something we feel the need to regulate.
Final Thought
This is not just about dogs. It is about the kind of world we are shaping, one notice, one fine, one policy at a time.
Because when the simplest acts of kindness are discouraged in the very places meant to nurture thought, care, and responsibility we are not just managing animals.
We are redefining what it means to be human.