> For now, if they catch a dog the chances are high its already treated. Wouldn't there be basically no dogs left in a couple year? So just keep the program going for another 5 years or so and they wouldn't be catching very many dogs in the first place.
> Wouldn't there be basically no dogs left in a couple year? You may be amazed how many people don't see pets as responsibilities and either discard them for trivial reasons (like moving house) or let them breed and then dump the litter out to fend for themselves.
If it's a step down from 100k, it's progress! Also, the numbers have been decreasing for a long time already, else Bhutan couldn't conclude that they are done.
They are not done. They claim they sterilized all the dogs. If they stop doing what they're doing even for a year, they'll have to do this again. Sterilization alone doesn't work.
I agree. Their numbers are either so low that it counts as "done", or they actually didn't encounter any for a certain amount of time. They must either continuously sterilize the small trickle of remaining strays or plan a follow-up campaign. Implementing low-cost tree registration of pets should also help.
You actually want the sterilized strays to remain so that they put pressure on the resources that would otherwise feed the unsterilized strays. That suppresses the stray population even further. Also, wtf?
You want packs of stray dingo dogs running around your kids and your homes? I see no value in that. Seems more intuitive for the community at large to use a shelter-system...When I was ten or eleven I nearly got mauled by a seventy pound stray dog that was fighting my neighbors dog. Would have made no difference had that thing been vaccinated.
I know yours is a joke comment, but without the dogs eating the food (the garbage), some other animal is going to eat it instead. I predict an explosion of rats in another decade.
Not really. Dogs often topple over garbage bin, and spill content on streets. Some countries use garbage bags, dogs break those. Without dogs, there is a good chance garbage just stays in bins, and gets actually collected!
Rats are quite good at climbing and chewing - they are very able to get into garbage cans, unless they are metal and latched.
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 only sane, permanent solution is to police (prospective) animal owners or traders, who are the actual root cause of such mess. Why should everybody else compensate indefinitely for their lack of care and character?
That's the tragedy of the commons. That's why we institute collective solutions to these difficult problems.
I wish Turkey would do this too. Street dogs gather in packs and periodically attack people: not just small children, they go after grown men and women who are just walking down the street during daylight hours. This is true in major cities, like Ankara. When I’m there I avoid walking around after sunset or in areas without people, primarily because I don’t want to be stuck in the open with 3 or 4 hungry street dogs…
In Thailand street dogs have learned to fear the sound of an electric tazer. I used to live there and always carried one with me, just to activate it was enough to scare them off. I remember once being awake at night, sick with some flu, and a street dog just would not stop barking. I hear a gate/window open, a tazer activates and the dog stops. So this was just a guy sticking his hand out a window and activating the…
Also in most such countries if you pick up a rock as if to throw it at them it scares them off as the locals often throw rocks quite effectively.
That was an amazing achievement, treating something like 10,000 dogs a year for 15 years! Now that the initiative has ended I hope that some form it continues since maintaining a sterilized and vaccinated population will be a lot easier and less expensive than waiting until things get out of hand again. Outsiders wandering in and escaped pets turned strays have the potential to undo much of their great work.
I don't get it. Why not just euthanize them? Surely that would be cheaper than sterilizing and vaccinating them all, and the benefits would be seen sooner.
Is a solution, but not the best one. Would guarantee to propagate any disease much far away in no time.
Street dogs provide also some services that are valuable like rodent control or cleaning roadkills
I don't get it. Why not just euthanize them? Surely that would be cheaper than sterilizing and vaccinating them all, and the benefits would be seen sooner.
You actually want the sterilized strays to remain so that they put pressure on the resources that would otherwise feed the unsterilized strays. That suppresses the stray population even further. Also, wtf?
Why "wtf?" They don't have stray dogs everywhere. They don't exist here in Japan; any stray dogs are seized, and presumably euthanized. Why have nuisance animals roaming around that cause a lot of problems and attack people? Do you think it's somehow a good thing to have stray dogs? wtf?
You actually want the sterilized strays to remain so that they put pressure on the resources that would otherwise feed the unsterilized strays. That suppresses the stray population even further. Also, wtf?
You want packs of stray dingo dogs running around your kids and your homes? I see no value in that. Seems more intuitive for the community at large to use a shelter-system...When I was ten or eleven I nearly got mauled by a seventy pound stray dog that was fighting my neighbors dog. Would have made no difference had that thing been vaccinated.
This is exactly why stray dogs shouldn't be allowed to exist. They're a threat to the community. We don't have them at all here in Japan, as far as I can tell; we do have real wild animals, like bears and boars, that sometimes threaten and attack people, but that's normally only in rural places, and those are actual wild animals, not feral pets or invasive species. We also have stray cats, but while one might argue those are a threat to some native animal species like birds, they're certainly not a threat to humans.