next up the street rats
My brain spent about 2.5 seconds wondering how the hell you spay or neuter a rat before giving up.
It can be done to drosophila, as alluded to in https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3197105/
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
#22That 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.
Re: Bhutan declares its entire street dog population fully sterilized and vaccinated
#23That 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.
Bhutan is deeply buddhist
Re: Bhutan declares its entire street dog population fully sterilized and vaccinated
#24so in ~5 years time, no street dogs in Bhutan???
That's impossible. Because where do street dogs come from? They come from homes. As long as dogs exist there will be street dogs. But at least they got a huge leg up on the problem.
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.
Re: Bhutan declares its entire street dog population fully sterilized and vaccinated
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean as long as they don't start again too late it should be fine, right? For now, if they catch a dog the chances are high its already treated. So the return of reward is comparably low. Once the unvaccinated/unsterilized population has grown again, it makes sense again to get active. The point would be to not restart again too late.
> 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.
Re: Bhutan declares its entire street dog population fully sterilized and vaccinated
#26> There are approximately 300 million street dogs across Asia Didn’t expect that number honestly.
Asia has 4.5 billion humans. So that works out around 15 persons per dog. Seems quite spot-on given that these dogs will eat on leftovers and whatever humans throw to them. I wonder if they derived the number that way (highly doubt they are id-ing all these dogs).
There are a bunch of methods for doing field surveys of animal population in the wild, but they don't work so well for large animals. I'm curious how they estimated it, too.
Re: Bhutan declares its entire street dog population fully sterilized and vaccinated
#27next up the street rats
My brain spent about 2.5 seconds wondering how the hell you spay or neuter a rat before giving up.
It's expensive and risky, and it can be hard to find a specialist vet. I kept pet rats once, and it was easier to just separate the males and females from each other.
Re: Bhutan declares its entire street dog population fully sterilized and vaccinated
#28Older cartoons of the west often feature (primarily as a villain) the "dog catcher".
Usually in cartoons the dogs were simply taken to the pound, which was depicted as being basically "jail for dogs", but I suspect that most of the animals picked up off the street by dog catchers didn't spend a lot of time behind bars.
They'd be sent to a nice ranch upstate, right?
Re: Bhutan declares its entire street dog population fully sterilized and vaccinated
#29I 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…
This happens in India[1,2] too, and rabies cases are sadly all too common there, so I applaud Bhutan for its success.
Are there any lessons for other countries in what Bhutan has achieved?
Eg for India a concern is: even with a real effort it’ll be difficult just given the size of the place and the routes available for other dogs to move in.
Then there’s massively underfunded local government and corruption to consider (and harder to fix). Charities do what they can but it’s a drop in the ocean.
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/01/india/india-stray-dog-attack-...
[2] https://scroll.in/article/1056464/why-is-india-seeing-so-muc...
Re: Bhutan declares its entire street dog population fully sterilized and vaccinated
#30I 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…
> 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 happened to me at night in Istanbul 10 years ago. I was walking down a side street and a pack of 5-6 dogs noticed me and began to follow me. At first they were tentative, but increasingly the bolder ones in the group closed the distance. I began moving more quickly, but stepping backward, facing the dogs.
They clearly had violence on their minds. By the time I was approaching a well-lit main street, I had been lunged at a dozen times, with each dog only thinking better of it at the last instant.
I only had a backpack which I could use as a blunt weapon, and if the other dogs joined in following a strike from one of the boldest, I was not at all confident in the outcome. Easily one of the scariest experiences of my life.