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.
While traveling SE Asia I didn't see that very often.
Besides in some rural areas (and even there), dogs turned into pets as in western "civilization" and their owners didn't want to eat them anymore.
When I was in Hanoi in 2010, in the central districts as unrural as you can get in Vietnam, skinned dog carcasses were hanging at a number of markets. If westernization has had an impact, it must be more recent than that. I’m curious to go back and see for myself.
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]
According to a random page I found online, pigs are typically slaughtered at 5-6 months old, so assuming a stable population, you'd expect the number of living pigs (raised for slaughter) at any time to be 42%-50% of the yearly amount, so 375,000,000 - 450,000,000 going purely off of your 900,000,000 figure, making 500,000,000 a reasonable estimate, no?
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 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.
> 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 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?
The Czech Republic is not a developing country though, but the wealthiest of the former Eastern Block countries. The cost might be easily covered by the fines, but I'm not so sure whether enough money can be extracted from perpetrators in less affluent countries.
>Wouldn't there be basically no dogs left in a couple year?
No. Plenty of people still won't sterilize their pets and abandon their litter in the street or some just run away or are lost or abandoned by their owners, therefore the stray dog population will never be absolute zero.
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.
If we believe that animals were created by someone for men, it would follow that men were also created for animals since some animals do eat human flesh.
The problem I see here is that dogs are not just "animals". They're artificial creations of humans, and an invasive species when they're not kept as pets inside homes. There's a good reason that, for instance, in the Australian outback they kill, on sight, and feral cat they find: they're invasive species that predate the local native animal species to extinction. Animals do not have a right to live when they don't belong in a particular ecosystem, especially when those animals aren't even natural to begin with.
If we were talking about a native species of bear, things would be entirely different.
taking lives of animals is a big thing in Buddhism
How do explain (South) Korea and Japan that eat plenty of meat and have a Buddhist majority? Sri Lanka also has lots of Buddhists, and also eats lots of meat. This seems like nonsense to me.
Animal welfare is a thing in Buddhism though. India has animal welfare in their constitution. Buddhism is also the only religion that notes animal rights.
I think you can compare it with Christians, there are plenty of sinners.
The first precept of Buddhism is not to kill humans or animals. Not everybody is going to be crazy strict about it, but that core value of not taking life is there.
Personally, I eat meat too, and I'm also not a huge fan of needlessly killing dogs, and I'm not even Buddhist! I feel like there's a middle ground where I can care about animals, respect life, and also have a cheeseburger. I'm certain some people will find that to be hypocritical, but it's really not a huge gotcha to me.
Buddhism in Bhutan is different. I think it's the state religion, has monarchy support, it's Vajrayana (very few countries have Vajrayana as their major Buddhism), and religion is less "background noise" in Bhutan than somewhere like Japan, a kind of Buddhist-Shinto mash-up dissolving into atheism.
I think Buddhism in Bhutan likely did influence this course of action.
The himalayas they also traditionally kill animals for food. They basically consumed 3 things barley, yak products (meat and milk) and tea.
They didn't have much choice; was hard to grow anything else up in the mountains.But they were conscious about it and still careful but other animal lives.
It's not only because they care about the animal, but also very much about they are afraid of the karma they create for themselves.
Now in the refugee areas they prefer to buy their meat from the Islamic community ironically enough.
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.
To play devil's advocate here, I do think that human sensibilities about life preservation can be inconsistent and illogical.
Your comment itself is contradictory is it not? If I am to understand "Also, wtf?" to mean something like "euthanising dogs is immoral because it shortens their life", your other argument is that sterilisation is superior because it essentially starves the other dogs. How is starvation morally superior to euthanasia?
Caveat: I actually also have the same emotional knee-jerk response. I own and love a dog very dearly, and the idea of just "getting rid of all the dogs" doesn't sit well with me.
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.
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 foundations on which we sit, if that makes sense at all.
If I may make an attempt at the moral underpinning, it is something like "survival as intrinsic worth". There are flaws to this position, as with any.
Setting aside the fact that I'd be witness to less deaths because I've chosen a more effective protocol for population control, I think letting them live out their lives isn't a net negative. Why would I expend energy ending lives if they don't impact mine?
Granted, there are times when euthanasia would be necessary. For example, feral dog populations in areas where the vulture population has died off, where they carry disease and attack passersby and the supply of food is basically uncontrollable, I get it. But that's a case I personally would preemptively qualify if I were considering it.
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.
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.
A lot of families around the world aren't able to have the number of children they'd prefer to have. There's a lot of reasons for it many of which come down to people not having enough money for a family. Lack of affordable housing and childcare are big ones. Uncertainty about the security of our future is another. If a government did want to prevent humans from reproducing, they've got a pretty good head start and plenty of examples of what to do more of.
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.
The populations will just rebound unless you really manage to euthanize all of them. Sterilizing and vaccinating takes care of the problem.
Unless the problem really got out of hand, it's not just "some people" who oppose a total cull. Even if people silently approve of the cull, one will find much less volunteers for such an effort than for a large-scale sterilization and vaccination program.
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.
Who funds the shelter system, and where do the dogs end up?
It's hard for a small municipality with a stray problem to justify a facility that is entirely dedicated to the bureaucracy of scheduled death. This is a tale as old as time and the end result is not a happy one.
The term "kill shelter" is much more common than "shelter" because by nature a shelter is temporary housing before euthanization resources are available/confirmed.
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.
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?
This is a very good question because it touches many grounds. What's the humanist position on this? What's the (many) religion's position on this? And I'd also say, economically speaking, what's more viable? To euthanize them or to sterilize them?
I'm totally biased in that euthanizing animals isn't a decision humans are meant to take unless you do have a responsibility for the animal (it's your pet, and it's ill, for instance). But in this specific case, no single human or humans have a direct responsibility for hundreds or thousands of dogs.
The proposition on euthanizing stray animals looks just like a temporal, quick and dirty solution that teaches nothing to humans more than hiding the dirty under the carpet. Nothing after this will prevent stray animals to grow in number after some are reintroduced.
Moreover, it isn't surprising that such points of view like yours are shared as of today, if we stop to think how all those animals ended sick, malnourished, and unprotected. There are people that still think that animals shouldn't be sterilized because of their "will" to reproduce themselves, or are just too lazy to do so.
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.
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.
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!
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
Fertility control alone: 12% to 40% population decrease. More effective over longer time spans (up to 20 years)
Culling alone: Effective in rapidly reducing population short-term, population replaced through compensatory breeding or migration from other locations
Combined CNR and responsible ownership targeted several flows into and between the dog subpopulations: it prevented the street dog population from increasing through births and abandonment, and it increased the adoption of dogs from the shelter dog population to the owned dog population. This combined method had a synergistic effect: neither CNR nor responsible ownership applied in isolation was as effective at reducing street dog population size
The key result of this thesis is that methods targeting multiple sources of population increase, such as combined CNR [capture-neuter-release] and responsible ownership campaigns, will be most effective at reducing free-roaming dog population size
You were claiming that this is not effective because people are buying dogs as pets and abandoning them.
Do you understand this thread is about Bhutan? It's a pretty poor country (source below) where not that many people think of buying a dog and then abandoning it.
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 to the first 10%.
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.
They could just not bother to catch them if they see ones with clipped ears. Also, catching them might be quite simple if you attract them with treats and treat them decently.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
A couple months ago, I was hiking in Nepal. The two of us had lunch at a restaurant on the trail where there was a puppy. One of us pet the puppy, the other fed it.
After lunch, as we continued the hike, the puppy started following us. For 2 hours! At first I thought we'd essentially stolen someone's dog. The Nepali guy I was hiking with explained that the puppy is basically a trail dog.
It soon became obvious that there were many dogs following people, hoping to get food. Eventually the puppy started following someone else who had more food.
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?
I’m not sure the exact answer, but one major difference between stray dogs and truly wild animals is that dogs typically can’t survive in the wild, they need to live near human settlements. This sets them apart from wolves (the nearest wild relatives of dogs).
IMHO, the crucial point is whether they are populations that were wild all along (never domesticated) or whether they wholly originate from domestic dogs. But that's hard to say since domesticated dogs might have taken over the first group. Similar to how modern humans are hypothesized to have supplanted Neanderthals and other pockets of ancient human populations.
Street dogs make other street dogs. They don't need new ones abandoned from their owners. Only sterile dogs don't make new ones which is what this sterilization campaign is about. New street dogs will come from homes and possibly from nearby countries.
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 hunting me.
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 tazer to get the dog to shut up.
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.
> 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.
Maybe someone from Turkey can shed light but it seems to have become much better. In 2019 all strays were tagged and I was under the impression any ill behaved one would be dealt with.
They already do? If you see a dog that has their ear marked, it means the dog has been sterilized by the municipality. If you want to help, you can take ant stray dog to a vet and they will sterilize the dog for free.
The real problem is the “people” who attack the dogs for no reason and teach them to be violent. Dogs are very social animals and they learn to respond to the society they are in. Where I live the biggest problem we have with stray dogs is we feel sorry for some of them being obese.
Similar experience. One of them even tried to go for my leg. Had a very very bright flashlight which I used to blind them. After that I walked with a sharp ended walking pole and would not hesitate to stab them with it. It was a very hairy situation. Did not encounter the pack again since I stopped moving around the town at dark.
Easier to get people to agree to sterilisation than a cull, I suspect, but sterilisation also has one other effect: It reduces the rate of reproduction of unsterilised animals in same population, who will be less and less likely to stumble upon an unsterilised mate.
A factor could have been that Bhutan's population is mostly Buddhist & Hindu, with a relatively high number of vegetarians, so a cull would be objected to for religious reasons as well as the normal "people love dogs" reasons.
100% is a big achievement in street dog unavailability - much harder than, say, 99.999%. In k-nines (un)availability, the cost usually increases by 10 * k to increment k by 1.
It's tempting to imagine that they didn't actually get to 100%, and there are some hidden holdouts who have escaped the program and will re-establish the street dog population covertly.
You should try actually reading the linked article, what they've done is good both for us and for the dogs. Unless you like dogs who are malnourished, unfed and have rabies.
Of course, dead dogs and no dogs at all are better than alive dogs, which is to say that I stand by my point.
And no need to read the article as I've grown among stray dogs until relatively recently (as I'm from Eastern Europe), not the best thing ever but certainly preferable to having only us, humans, around.
By name I'd say you're romanian. Certainly you must know of the 2 kids that died there to stray dogs in the recent years right? One of them died in a parc.
Also, why are you inserting yourself in a discussion about an article without reading the article?
Yes, I'm Romanian, yes, I know about those two kids (only two?), yes, I've run away from stray dogs when I was a kid more and once, and, yes, my dad himself has the mark of a dog bite on his inner calf (which he got when he was around 5 years of age).
> Also, why are you inserting yourself in a discussion about an article without reading the article?
Because of my direct lived experience with stray dogs (granted, not in Central Asia but in Eastern Europe), which I'm pretty much sure the author of the article didn't have, nor most of the people reading said article. And because I've already read similar articles countless of times, for more than 15-20 years now (just web search for Brigitte Bardot and Romania), at some point you've read one you've read them all.
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 Bhutan's case, the dogs aren't going anywhere. The 100% number is simply not believable and soon there will be again a small, but manageable population.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Countries for sure aren't like "Let's have a population of rabid stray dogs. Wouldn't it be nice". Although they can be useful as they get rid of animal carcasses on the streets. But they have to be taken care of, else there numbers become overwhelming and they might pick up and spread rabies.
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!
We have taken in two dogs from shi^D^D^D places with feral dog populations (Eastern Europe and Sardinia). Both were ill and heavily traumatized (took me two years before I was able to touch the one of them).
It took 2-3 years per dog and lots of financial and time investment for good food, medicine and upbringing to get them to be somewhat normal.
Are you sure you haven't simply rationalized the dysfunction away?
In India, it's because a very prominent MP (and aunt of INC Rahul Gandhi / daughter in law of former PM Indira Gandhi) in the BJP is a massive dog lover and militantly opposed to regulating the stray population. [0][1]
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.
It's sunrise and a vet stands at the edge of a parking lot, at the top of a short flight of stairs leading down to the beach below. Off in the distance a few hundred meters away, a dog jogs off down the empty beach. The vet, arms hanging by his side and feeling dejected, simply says "Balls..." and turns away.
Knowing how easily even the smallest things torture me, I deliberately avoid contact with them. A cloud passing in front of the sun is enough to make me suffer. How then should I not suffer in the darkness of the endlessly overcast sky of my own life? With Balls running down that sandy beach and humping any hope for my irreverent and everlasting search for peace? My everlasting search for isolation?
I hate this so much. Humans are a disease when considering only things like this.
What authority does any human have to neuter animals at random? Why? Because they will suffer? The kick them out to the wild if you don't want to see their suffering, let them adapt to there.
Few things disgust me more than cruelty disguised as kindness. You can own an animal, you can kill one but only for food or clothing and other survival needs but no one has the right mutilate animals and leave them to linger on.
The problem is humans now have weapons, pesticide and tech to fight off things animals would have helped is with and this is our response. You don't need sterlisarion and kill shelters, animals either starve to death or adapt and move out to areas where they can find food/prey. If you are worried about the ecosystem in a city, donate to a zoo so you can look at whatever animals you want, humans and their pets decimating a city's ecosystem is a natural outcome of the human-animal ecosystem!
Our insistence in regulating ecosystems is what is unnatural. Leave the animals be, get comfortable with strays in your city like some cities already are (istanbul and i hear rome too).
Not every place on Earth has the same weather through the year as those countries you mention. Dogs aren't really animals born to live in the wild, if a dog has to go through really extreme temperatures, has no food or water, isn't that pain and suffering as well?
Yes, life is pain and suffering. You feed and shelter them, you don't mutilate their bodies. If you were hungry and starving, would you want your balls chopped off so you don't make babies? Or would you want shelter and food? Neutering isn't free. You can create dog parks/sanctuaries and collect leftover food from people and restaurants (tons of it) in exchange for tax relief or just breed animals they can hunt and ear in the park.
Wouldn't sheltering and gathering dogs which aren't neutered in the same space an occasion for them to reproduce themselves and increase in number?
"You can create dog parks/sanctuaries and collect leftover food from people and restaurants", is this in practice somewhere?
I ask not to sound annoying or pedantic, just from the deepest curiosity. Animals' care has been always a problem I want to help with, so I'm open to any ideas.
If you let them hunt prey for food and don't treat them when they're sick the population should be regulatable. Starving animals don't make a lot of babies and when population is normal starvation becomes rare. Animals exist in an ecosystem, having to fight with other prey and hunt/search for food means much less time making babies. The issue people have with this is tolerating the natural suffering (not intervening) , and allowing smaller animals to be hunted.
Think of it as a "dog conservation" area where dogs are allowed but predators that kill dog are not and prey dogs can hunt is introduced but not heavily regulated.
The part humans have a hard time with is allowing animals to suffer naturally. But out in nature, natural animal suffering is very common. That's how animal populations self regulate. They say dogs can't survive in the wild, that's partly true because most natural ecosystems have predators that will hunt them and prey that are hard to catch for dogs. But there are prey dogs can catch easily like rabbits that are in many areas (like farms) considered pests. Now imagine a dog conseravation area near rabbit infestes areas instead of pesticides! And imagine adapting dogs from these areas instead of kill shelters.
We humans have the power to craft ecosystems and plenty of unused and unfarmable and hard to develop wild land our pets would love (e.g.: much of oregon).
But even if that wasn't possible, my view is that allowing city dogs to starve is natural, you can feed them excess foods and they will reproduce then, but at some point there won't be enough food for the little ones to sustain them so that would be nature's way of regulating them.
And if you step back a bit for perspective. Humans have the same problem. Not that we humans should let each other starve but people who can't feed their children can avoid prefnancy at will and avert that suffering while animals aren't smart enough to do that.
Humans in the end are not in charge of regulating the natural fate of animals.
Have you been to Asia and seen the state that most of those dogs are in ? You aren't doing them any favors by letting them reproduce.
Dogs won't go off in to the wild by themselves, they are social animals and like being around people. Not in the least because they receive left over food and get more out of the trash. But they receive very little health care.
Not many people are bothered by them. This is all for the benefit of the animal, not us humans. IMHO.
It's not your animal, so leave it alone. Would you do the same to hungry africans for example? Same problem isn't it? Lots of people going hungry and exploding population, should they be neutered for their own sake?
People and animals are different, I get that but how is it kindess when it is an animal but cruelty when it is people? Instead of mutilating them, feed them.
Wow - great on them! At first I was saddened at the idea of sterilizing that many animals but on further reading the article estimates there are 300 million street dogs across Asia... That's a hard number to swallow.
It is extremely cruel to neuter an adult male dog and release it. They will have fatigue, lethargy, and weakness that will slowly kill them. They lose all “fight,” energy, and will to live. It is nothing like neutering a dog before it matures.
A family member had my dog neutered without my permission while watching him him for me, and his rapid decline and death were heartbreaking…. Euthanasia is much less cruel.
It's widely known to wait until a dog is fully grown before sterilization nowadays. Getting them neutered or spayed as a puppy tends to lead to more widespread bone problems, especially hip displasia.
Do you have any literature that supports what you are claiming?
No, the vast majority of knowledge out there has never been studied scientifically. If you reject knowledge that isn't "in literature" you are flying blind in life... even scientists can't do that in their own research.
I'm talking from both firsthand experience with dogs, and also as an adult human male that had a medical issue where my testosterone production stopped, which was a fascinating and terrifying firsthand experience into what testosterone actually does... I basically lost all passion and drive, and was both extremely fatigued and indifferent to pretty much everything, exactly the same thing that happened to my dog. I wouldn't wish it on anyone.
I have also had several male dogs neutered as puppies that had no major health issues, and plenty of energy and excitement about life into old age.
So why does a sudden drop of testosterone cause fatigue and a whole host of other medical and psychological issues in adult males (human, canine, and presumably all mammals), but women and children have plenty of energy with lower levels? I have looked somewhat into the scientific literature on this, and have not seen any conclusive explanation, but would love to know.
There is plenty of research into the symptoms of both humans and dogs about the symptoms of hypoandrogenism/hypogonadism. I would be very surprised if neutering was somehow less harmful (especially since having seen firsthand that it is not).
The post title feels grammatically off in a way I'm struggling to articulate. I think it's the difference between "declares <object> <adjective>" and "declares that <clause>".
I think my problem is that the former is used in contexts that are either subjective or abstract, whereas the latter is just and indication that somebody has said something.
When you declare <thing> <attribute>, you are making an assertion with some implicit authority. When you declare that <event has happened>, you are simply making an announcement.
Didn’t expect that number honestly.
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