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 etc.
And they are cute and friendly and nice to have around!
> 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.
Yeah, joking aside I think pet registry has to be the other side of this + enforcement with DNA tests. If you have puppies, and they end up as strays, there should be sanctions.
Depends how affordable DNA tests are. For a developing country, sterilization and vaccination might be cheaper than tracking every stray dog to their or their parent's owner. Policy can also make this infeasible if, for example, dog registration is too expensive in the first place for owners.
It doesn't necessarily directly starve the other dogs, they'll have less energy to attempt to reproduce with. It's not an attempt to increase the death rate as much as it is an attempt to decrease the birth rate. My "also, wtf" stands.
If a government had a goal to prevent humans from reproducing and forcibly sterilized and cynically used the population they could reach to pressure and control the population they couldn't, it would be called genocide.
Plenty of people won't have or will delay having children because they can't find stable housing.
It doesn't necessarily directly starve the other dogs, they'll have less energy to attempt to reproduce with. It's not an attempt to increase the death rate as much as it is an attempt to decrease the birth rate. My "also, wtf" stands.
I think these things usually come down to perceptions of human intervention as basically bad. If you actually witnessed the death of every individual dog in your scenario as compared with euthanasia, it's not clear that it would be more pleasant at all. These dogs will die diseased and malnourished by the roadside. Again, I am not really at odds with your emotional position, I'm just interested in the moral foundatio…
In countries with well-managed stray dog populations, people actually feed them, and they get rid of carcasses and other leftovers on the street. Their life might be harsh, but not entirely unpleasant. In countries with unmanaged populations, people will be harsh towards them and mistreat them. And they will also be more aggressive towards humans in return.
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.
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.
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?
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?
If the suppression from competition is having an effect, then you’ll have dogs dying in random places from malnourishment. You might also have more aggressive dogs as the hungrier an animal is, the greater risks it will take to feed.
Directly euthanizing them would definitely be more effective. Reality is just too grim for some people to admit.
Yeah, joking aside I think pet registry has to be the other side of this + enforcement with DNA tests. If you have puppies, and they end up as strays, there should be sanctions.
Depends how affordable DNA tests are. For a developing country, sterilization and vaccination might be cheaper than tracking every stray dog to their or their parent's owner. Policy can also make this infeasible if, for example, dog registration is too expensive in the first place for owners.
It might be surprisingly cheap. Prague was doing DNA matching on dog poop in the streets to fine owners for not cleaning up.
I think there were some problems from people breaking the poop bins and scattering the contents everywhere to reduce trust in the system ("it's not my fault, I cleaned up, someone took it out of the bin") but that wouldn't be a problem for strays right?
Quite the achievement. Many years ago on a Thai beach there were a few stray dogs and the locals said one was called "Balls" because he was the only one that they couldn't sterilize. Every time the vet arrived Balls would smell him a mile away and just bolt, disappearing for a few hours.