SC Order On Stray Dogs: Viral Video Shows Animal Shelter In Iraq, Not Delhi

Claim

Video claiming to show a large walled enclosure where stray dogs have been permanently confined following a controversial Supreme Court order on August 11, 2025, directing authorities to free Delhi-NCR’s streets of the animals.

The archived version of the post can be seen here, which has clocked 643.5K views so far.

Fact

Newschecker noticed a faint watermark reading, “Erbil Iraq,” which suggested that the 41-second video was not from India.

A reverse image search of keyframes led us to this Instagram post, dated March 10, 2025, sharing a longer and clearer version of the video, where the watermark read, “The forgotten dogs of Erbil, Iraq.”

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Ben N.C. Hoffmeister (@givemeyourvoice)

“… there are supposed to be over 300 thousand stray dogs in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. This hidden place somewhere outside of the city Erbil (Population 1.8 Million) is called a ‘shelter’, but basically the dogs (probably more than 10,000) are just dumped there without enough food or medical care. Whatever you can imagine is happening there. How can we help?,” read the post. A similar Instagram post can be seen here, dated May 27, 2024.

A further search led us to this report by Iraq-based Shafaq News, dated December 2, 2023, stating that nearly 3,000 stray dogs had been collected and transferred to a shelter in Erbil, sharing some images of the shelter. 

A comparison of a screengrab of the viral video (left) with an image from the Shafaq News report (right) on the Erbil shelter, further confirmed that it was the same place.  

A similar video of the Erbil shelter can be seen here, dated November 18, 2023.

Also Read: SC Order On Stray Dogs: Unrelated Video From Vietnam Falsely Claims To Show Mass Culling Of Canines In Delhi

Sources
Instagram post, givemeyourvoice, March 10, 2025