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.
The cost may still be a little too far out, but what about requiring breeders to register the dog's DNA sequence in some database. If the dog is found as a stray, a large fine is imposed on the breeder or the most recently registered owner. The fines could go towards programs for neutering and finding homes for strays. If particular breeders are frequently coming up as strays, they could loose their breeder license, etc. Of course to play my own devil's advocate, the risk here is that the owners who have lost interest in keeping a pet kill the animals instead of releasing them.
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.
One way to do it would be to test each candidate parent dog for the problematic genetics and simply not breed the ones that do have the problems. That isn't any more ominous than breeding in general.
Where it is possible it will also be more effective than culling; it should lead to a population of animals that are free of the problem altogether.
It's a complex choice with surprising implications see discussions in thread regarding different optimal timing for different breeds.
Would you have cops seize unfixed animals, vets report same, perhaps a tip line to report your neighbors? Extra cops to handle enforcement, extra beuracrats to manage and track compliance?
Since fixing all dogs would make dogs extinct I presume you wanted licenses for breeders. I'm sure the same people won't just pay a license fee and do the same things maybe we can require an an education program hire more paper pushers to write additional regulations, hire inspectors.
I'm sure this whole thing won't just become a massive tax on dog ownership ensuring dogs start at 2000 with a $200 annual tax stamp.
Everyone that ever wants to fix the world via legislation says that there ought to be a law ____. You have to actually enforce the laws and deal with implications.
Another effective method is high rates of neutering for pets. There are geographically segregated areas in the UK that can somewhat confidently say they have no strays.
It can take a while to catch a stray, plenty long enough for them to successfully breed, which just multiplies the problem!
Hardly anyone in NYC would comply with such a law. They would just ignore it. The city could perhaps require DNA testing by animal shelters and legitimate breeders within it's borders. But many dogs come from elsewhere, or from backyard breeders who don't care about laws.
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
They would know, the DNA is different. There are animal DNA matching sites for breeders' use. Dog DNA is especially interesting because their genes are more 'slippery' than those of other species.
There's a really interesting question about incentivization behind this. Everybody knows that there are too many dogs, and as a result many die in shelters because they aren't adopted. Yet many folks continue to buy dogs from breeders, particularly in America where they actually sell dogs in stores!
So what is the best solution so that exactly the right amount of dogs exist and none are killed. This is innovative, but I suspect training doesn't scale. Perhaps make it illegal to sell dogs until we're out of strays? Maybe a tax deduction for adopting a dog, or a tax penalty on buying a dog? Or an anti-breeding campaign (like the anti-fur one which has been very successful)?
It wasn't mentioned there is a 23andme for Dogs called Embarkvet (Austin, TX the DNA is sent to Canada for processing strangely enough)
We got our dog from craigslist due to timing and waitlist issues with purebred breeders. At first we were worried and got a DNA test. She's a mutt and now that I know I am happier albeit lucky there is nothing identifiably wrong with her. I think many prospective owners are afraid because there is a higher risk of uncertain behavior and characteristics from mutts. The DNA tests took 2 months however, most people buy puppies at 8 weeks and no breeder wants to shell out $150-$200 dollars and puppies are harder to sell the older they get sadly.
I think the cheaper and quicker these DNA test are the more the dog community will be able to open their eyes in a more transparent light. I've sadly met owners who want returns/discounts for defects in their purebred huskies which leaves me with mixed feelings.
Why would anyone buy a dog where they can be held liable for the genetic disposition of its parents?
The dog has a degree of autonomy or self-agency, and can make decisions that put its owner at legal risk. Someone else brought it into the world, but you, ultimately, made the purchase.
Shelters are also full of dogs with severe behavioral disorders which can't be treated or managed effectively. How confident are you in selecting a shelter dog which might live with you for another 10, 12 years, versus a dog from a breeder that you know the genealogy of (and therefore the parents, grandparents behavioral traits)?
There's a difference between buying from a backyard breeder who doesn't care about the quality of dogs they're producing, and a quality breeder who vets buyers, parental lines, and has offspring contracts to prevent future unwanted litters.
Yes, definitely. Because most of the dogs that would actually be looked after would be great for a variety of other tasks - everything from being service dogs, dogs that check for illegal substances by smell, police dogs, dogs who can herd animals and a variety of other tasks. Even new tasks that people still haven't been able to offload to canines.
If the animals can provide more value to humanity and will be allowed to become smarter and somewhat evolve, i think it's definitely worth it. Otherwise, if selective breeding for utility wasn't a thing already, we probably wouldn't have breeds that are passable for any of the tasks above.
As for wild dogs, this hasn't ever been a major problem in my country. I haven't seen any, there have never been any news stories about people being bitten or killed by wild dogs, i don't know anyone who has had run in with them and frankly there are bigger problems in the country - things like racoons and other small animals that carry rabies, foxes and the occasional wolves that kill off young deers and does alike, beavers that build dams and flood portions of the forest and so on.
Edit: looked for any studies that i could find, sadly there were none that'd attempt to quantify how many stray dogs there are in the country and how many of those have attacked people and how many have attacked other animals. Just found a news report of one person being bitten by them:https://baltics.news/2021/03/16/in-rezekne-region-a-woman-is...
Just to be clear, i am not attempting to say that wild dogs are not a large problem, just that it's not a problem everywhere to the same degree and that quite possibly there are other social factors at play - why would there be more wild dogs on one region of the world as opposed to another, especially when humans are the ones who breed these animals in the first place? Do the people not look after them? Are there puppy mills that get abandoned? Do people generally not view having dogs as a great responsibility? Are there no services that take care of wild and stray animals?
It's not like humans couldn't do anything about it either - if wild dogs are an inevitability in certain parts of the world, why not disallow "importing" dogs of these breeds to those regions and disallow breeding them there?
Here's an example of concentrated effort in regards to eradicating rabies in the country, i don't see why something similar couldn't be done in regards to stray animals (though it may only work on a smaller scale like in this country, at least without lots of coordinated effort): https://ec.europa.eu/food/sites/food/files/animals/docs/reg-...
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