The BCI was established in 1959 by Captain V. Sundaram and his family, who was a member of the
Animal Welfare Board of India (AWBI) in the early 1960s and again in the 1980s. Initially started as a small group, it grew to become one of the country's largest animal welfare organizations, running active animal welfare, animal rights and humane education programmes. It was registered as a society under the Societies Act in 1964. The AWBI granted recognition in 1966. In 1964, soon after its inception, BCI suggested the city's corporation, which had been catching and killing street dogs since 1860 (to control its population and control rabies deaths in humans), an alternate method of capturing street dogs, neutering them and administering
anti-rabies vaccine before discharging them to their original location, which would both control the population and help reduce and eventually prevent human deaths due to rabies. However, as the corporation did not heed this advice, BCI started working on this programme on its own. BCI began to rescue, spay and vaccinate street dogs and also persuaded pet owners and people taking care of street dogs to bring them for treatment free of cost. By the early 1970s, the number of stray dogs killed by the corporation was so high that the
Central Leather Research Institute started designing products such as neckties and wallets from dog skins. By 1996, as many as 135 dogs were killed each day by the corporation, which employed various methods including administering a saturated solution of
magnesium chloride directly into their hearts,
poisoning,
electrocuting, clubbing to death and burying alive in pits covered with
bleaching powder and
pesticides. In 1995, the then Corporation Commissioner S. Abul Hassan agreed to let BCI carry out an Animal Birth Control-Anti-Rabies (ABC-AR) programme in South Madras with the rider that the Commissioner would personally monitor the process and results. In 1995, even as BCI started the ABC-AR programme in South Chennai, street dogs in other parts of the city were still caught and killed. Soon, as the ABC-AR method started yielding visible results, the corporation agreed to relinquish its catch-and-kill policy and implement ABC-AR throughout the city, starting September 1996, marking the beginning of the ABC-AR programme in India. The number of human deaths in Chennai due to rabies dropped from 120 in 1996 to zero in 2007 and in 2010 the Corporation of Chennai declared Chennai to be rabies-free. However, there were a few deaths after the Chennai Corporation limits were greatly increased a few years later owing to less rigorous implementation of the ABC-AR programme in the suburbs and not abiding by the PCA Act (1960) and the Dog Rule Act (2001). Soon the corporations in other cities in India and around the world invited the then Chairman of the BCI, Chinny Krishna, to share the expertise in international conferences in
Bratislava,
Cairo,
Sofia,
Orlando,
Hong Kong,
Manila, Colombo, Riga, Amman,
Singapore,
Bali and
Chengdu and to initiate the ABC-AR programmes in their cities. In May 2013, the government of the
Republic of Mauritius, which had been using catch-and-kill as the only method to control the number of stray dogs, solicited the assistance of BCI to introduce ABC-AR programme in Mauritius. Unfortunately, the Mauritius government did not go ahead with the programme. ==Facilities==