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.
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.
In other words, people can do what they want with their dogs. They just need to kill them first. There are lots of ways you can do that, but starvation isn't one of them, because that's a welfare issue. Seems pretty obvious.
While "a few winners and a whole fuckin' lot of losers" applies anywhere, the difference, the article says, is that in this case the losers have a lot more potentially malicious power over consumers, and you never want to be standing next to a desperate dying animal.
It's an animal welfare nightmare. Many of these animals are growing too fast to support their own body weight and can barely move by the time they're sent to their deaths.
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.
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.
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.
You may have to euthanize that animal if no one wants to adopt it.
Sorry, but there are worse things in the world than putting down animals.
And don’t even try to come at me if you eat meat! Every one of us who eats factory farmed meat (y.t. included) is participating in far worse atrocities than a shelter humanely euthanizing a relative handful of dogs.
If people would stop rescuing dogs, those dogs would live to die in cages or be put down. I don't see how this would feed back into the demand for breeding.
It is important to note that the fact "Starvation is also a way to live longer." is probably wrong as some scientist have noticed.
The problem is that animals in laboratories are "coach potatoes". They don't do the exercise they naturally do in their habitat searching for food.
They live overcrowded in small cages and overstressed. Most lab animals are already ill from their artificial habitat, they have diabetes and other disorders.
Strong social animals are isolated so they don't create problems like fighting each other(what are thy going to do if not?).
Imagine you were forced to live in a sofa, or in your bed, all your life, with no sunlight but LED lighting.
Most of those animals are overeating for their activity, so making them starve is better than not doing it. But this tells us nothing about real animals in the real world.
There have been a few videos showing dogs and cats being collected/killed by the government.
Obviously food shortages are a problem. Pets are consuming an amount of food.
You don't need to collect the pets to stop them from consuming food. You collect pets to turn them into food. Ground meat will soon be delivered to these people. The probability someone will end up eating their own pet is 100%
Bud, these animals go to war with each other and tear each others faces off and get eaten alive by predators every day. This is hardly the worst thing to happen and its the only way to make progress in this area. They're also not trying to be cruel, its not some torture chamber.
Lots? I'm sure it's nothing compared to the premeditated killing of 150 billion animals born and bred into captivity on purpose, every year. Seeing as how not eating is infeasible, I'm not sure your solution is reasonable.
Directly euthanizing them would definitely be more effective. Reality is just too grim for some people to admit.
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