India, Aug. 15 -- The Bombay High Court on Friday told the Maharashtra government to step up implementation of the Animal Birth Control (ABC) programme to stop the growth of the stray dog population, saying that controlling reproduction would make it easier to tackle the wider problem of dog bites and public safety.

"If you resort to the ABC program, you should aggressively implement that and ensure that there is no growth in the population of stray dogs. If every dog is sterilised, procreation will stop and the issue will be solved," a division bench of Acting Chief Justice Ravindra V Ghuge and Justice Gautam Ankhad said. "You stop the growth then the other task becomes easy and if the population is growing then your problem is growing....