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Bhutan declares its entire street dog population fully sterilized and vaccinated

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Re: Bhutan declares its entire street dog population fully sterilized and vaccinated

#101

Post by samus »

theshrike79 wrote: post #90
samus wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The few times I've been to some Eastern European countries, the street dogs were indeed not an issue. Just unsightly. They are actually useful as they get rid of carcasses of other dead animals (pigeons, rats, etc.) on the streets. However, there are countries where the street dog population is way higher and attacks and rabies are a real problem. When these countries take action, they often mass-cull the dogs. In Bh…

> They are actually useful as they get rid of carcasses of other dead animals (pigeons, rats, etc.) on the streets. This is a super-weird argument. I live in a country where a stray dog population just doesn't exist. We aren't waist deep in pigeon and rat carcasses. The native carrion birds take care of them pretty quickly.

This is a good point. Carrion birds are so good at this that their disappearance in India led to an increased number of carcasses on the ground and has helped the stray dog population soar.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_vulture_crisis

Edit: I actually see dead pigeons on the street from time to time. If there is no nearby park with patches of dense woods, there might not be that many carrion birds in urban areas.

Re: Bhutan declares its entire street dog population fully sterilized and vaccinated

#102

Post by saalweachter »

samus wrote: post #95
linuskendall wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s not true for the most part in South Asia. Here we have dog populations that are basically native and have lived alongside humans for a long time. So these dog population are not stray pet dogs.

Then they are the offspring of dogs that escaped or were abandoned long ago. Probably they also took over the population of any related species they can interbreed with.

That's an interesting historical and semantic question.

So there may not be any such thing as a "wild pigeon". Pigeons were domesticated so long and widely that all modern pigeons in the wild may be the feral descendants of ancient domesticated pigeons. But we still view modern pigeons as just a thing that exists out in the world.

If street dogs have been a self-sustaining population for long enough does that change their classification? What if the population of street dogs is older than many of the cities they inhabit? What if the population is thousands, ten thousand years old?

Re: Bhutan declares its entire street dog population fully sterilized and vaccinated

#103

Post by londons_explore »

progbits wrote: post #96
weinzierl wrote: post #54

Congratulations! Rabies is such a scary disease but these vaccination campaigns do work. Germany, Estonia, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Austria and the Czech Republic became officially rabies free in 2003 after many years of vaccinating wild foxes and all the red rabies warning signs of my childhood are finally gone.

Vaccination campaigns are great but can you explain how you can declare countries rabies free without doing the same for their land neighbors? Last time I checked there were no border checks for foxes crossing from France, Poland etc. :) Is the assumption they don't have suitable habitats outside those countries? Or how do you stop backsliding?

You have to keep vaccinating...

Luckily, vaccination by dropping meat from a plane is a pretty effective way to vaccinate all the wild animals in a wide area.

Re: Bhutan declares its entire street dog population fully sterilized and vaccinated

#104

Post by mcv »

ajb wrote: post #72
athreyac8 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dogs as food?

People will eat anything when necessary. This is a famous restaurant menu from the 1870 siege of Paris: https://www.messynessychic.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Me... It contains entries such as Consommé d'Eléphant, Le Civet de Kangourou, and Le Chat flanquè de Rats

Even rat sounds fancy in French.

Re: Bhutan declares its entire street dog population fully sterilized and vaccinated

#105

Post by saalweachter »

rantallion wrote: post #87
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> catch and sterilize them Whats the limit on hiw fast you can catch and sterilise them? Neither sounds particularly difficult.

I imagine sterilising the ones you've caught is the easy part. How do you actually catch them all though? They claim to have sterilised 150000 dogs. At the beginning of the programme, you could reasonably assume that every stray dog you see needs to be processed. Later on in the programme, you'll be releasing a lot of dogs that have already been processed, which seems like a lot more effort for the last 10% compared…

Yes and no.

In these programs it is standard to mark the animal in some way. In NYC, for instance, you clip the top of one ear of a cat after it's been processed.

So you catch ten animals, immediately let go any ones that have been marked, process the last one or two -- still more effort to catch, but less effort to treat.

Re: Bhutan declares its entire street dog population fully sterilized and vaccinated

#106

Post by pcdoodle »

hrkucuk wrote: post #91
_giorgio_ wrote: post #79

Why do you even need to have a street dog population?

I don't know about Bhutan but street animals (mostly dogs & cats) is very common in Turkiye. From cultural point of view we see them as real residents of the place, we are taking up their land. So we are committed to treat them and feel responsible for their care as well. From a practical point of view, like other commentators suggested, they take care of the habitat - cats prevent rodents from going overpopulated et…

I appreciate this.

HN scares me sometimes.

Re: Bhutan declares its entire street dog population fully sterilized and vaccinated

#107

Post by Propelloni »

sinuhe69 wrote: post #12
sMarsIntruder wrote: post #2

> There are approximately 300 million street dogs across Asia Didn’t expect that number honestly.

Compared to “only” 500 millions pigs, the number of dogs is astounding. No wonder many countries also use them as food.

This number seems a little bit off. About 900 million pigs are slaughtered in Asia per year [1] That's 2.5 million dead pigs a day. Since we need live animals to breed more for killing them and it takes time before they are killed, this suggests that at any given time more than a billion pigs are alive in Asia.

But good thing that we sterilized those 150000 dogs, anything else would have been inhumane [2]

[1] https://faunalytics.org/global-animal-slaughter-statistics-a... [2] Sorry, I'm bitter.

Re: Bhutan declares its entire street dog population fully sterilized and vaccinated

#108

Post by quitit »

progbits wrote: post #96
weinzierl wrote: post #54

Congratulations! Rabies is such a scary disease but these vaccination campaigns do work. Germany, Estonia, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Austria and the Czech Republic became officially rabies free in 2003 after many years of vaccinating wild foxes and all the red rabies warning signs of my childhood are finally gone.

Vaccination campaigns are great but can you explain how you can declare countries rabies free without doing the same for their land neighbors? Last time I checked there were no border checks for foxes crossing from France, Poland etc. :) Is the assumption they don't have suitable habitats outside those countries? Or how do you stop backsliding?

You are right: borders don't matter - in reality the disease is eradicated well beyond the borders. Also keep in mind that many animals aren't great travellers, especially so if infected by rabies.

Claiming eradication is based on continued evidence from robust and internationally recognised monitoring and eradication programmes.

See the "Methods" and the footnotes sections from this CDC page: https://www.cdc.gov/rabies/resources/countries-risk.html

Re: Bhutan declares its entire street dog population fully sterilized and vaccinated

#109

Post by troupo »

samus wrote: post #86
troupo wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not odd. Sterilization without any additional measures is useless. People will keep buying and abandoning dogs. And if there's enough food, they will reproduce faster than you can catch and sterilize them

Since they have been doing it for 15 years, they now presumably have structures and processes in place to keep up with sterilizing more dogs. They also had lots of volunteers helping. If this keeps going, it's probably manageable in the future.

The thing is, you don't want to keep sterilizing 10k dogs a year indefinitely.

Re: Bhutan declares its entire street dog population fully sterilized and vaccinated

#110

Post by samus »

progbits wrote: post #96
weinzierl wrote: post #54

Congratulations! Rabies is such a scary disease but these vaccination campaigns do work. Germany, Estonia, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Austria and the Czech Republic became officially rabies free in 2003 after many years of vaccinating wild foxes and all the red rabies warning signs of my childhood are finally gone.

Vaccination campaigns are great but can you explain how you can declare countries rabies free without doing the same for their land neighbors? Last time I checked there were no border checks for foxes crossing from France, Poland etc. :) Is the assumption they don't have suitable habitats outside those countries? Or how do you stop backsliding?

Geographical borders probably help a lot. Stray dogs mostly stay around humans where food is much easier to come by, so there is probably no significant flow through the woods. And since the existing dog population doesn't suddenly disappear, there is no opening for strays from other countries to move in.
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