More for those who are interested:
[quote]The Science of Trap-Neuter-Release by Merritt Clifton
Presented to the Asia for Animals Conference, Hong Kong, September 3, 2003
On August 1, the city governor of Bangkok, Thailand,
ordered the eviction of street dogs from the central historical
district.
“Our city is not Calcutta,” the governor said.
The governor almost certainly did not understand that his
order, if enforced, would make Bangkok more like Calcutta.
What the governor said, yet did not know he said, was that
instead of street dogs he wanted Bangkok to have more rats, crows,
gulls, pigeons, feral cats, feral pigs, and monkeys running
amok–as occurs in Calcutta, where more than a century of poisoning
and electrocuting street dogs opened urban habitat up to them.
Compassionate Crusaders Trust founder Debasis Chakrabarti,
here in the audience, ended those abuses in Calcutta. The People
for Animals ABC street dog sterilization program that Debasis founded
in Calcutta has now made a good start toward controlling the problems
associated with street dogs by vaccinating and sterilizing them, and
treating them for mange.
Meanwhile, Calcutta and every other city that ever tried to
kill street dogs, including in the U.S., now has to deal with rats,
crows, gulls, pigeons, feral cats, and sometimes feral pigs and
monkeys, or raccoons, who occupy the same ecological niche as
monkeys in North America.
Each of these species is much harder to control.
All of these species are present in urban habitat anyway,
but in relatively low numbers. Their populations explode only when
dogs are not present to control them, partly by predation and
harassment, but mostly by consuming much of the available food.
So long as edible refuse remains abundant, the absence of
dogs will allow other urban wildlife to breed up to the carrying
capacity of the habitat, at equivalent biomass. That means ratios
of approximately one monkey or raccoon for each dog who has been
removed, or three cats, or anywhere from several dozen to several
hundred rats, gulls, crows, or pigeons.
So long as the habitat provides adequate food and cover for
animals, we will have whatever animals have evolved to survive in
the available niches–and I must mention that no one, not even the
Pied Piper, has yet found a way to rat-proof a city.
We cannot choose to not have animals as our neighbors,
because without them there would be habitat voids, and nature abhors
a void.
What we can choose is what kind of animals will become our
most visible neighbors.
Instead of learning to live with one easily tamed and
befriended species whose habits are well understood and whose
diseases are readily controlled and cured, the governor of Bangkok
said he wanted his city to be at much greater risk from leptospirosis
and bubonic plague, which are transmitted mainly by rat parasites.
He said he wanted Bangkok to be at much greater risk from
influenza and other corona viruses, transmitted mainly by birds,
with pigs as an intermediary for spreading mutated forms to humans.
He said wanted Bangkok to be at greater risk from the 90 or
more viruses, endemic among monkeys, which can severely infect
humans from a bite.
He also said he wanted Bangkok to have more poisonous snakes,
who in the absence of street dogs would do much more rat-catching.
That’s what the governor of Bangkok said, between the
lines–but I don’t think he meant it.
What he meant was that he wants a clean and healthy city.
What he did not understand is how to get there.
One option is to develop municipal sanitation so effective
that there is no longer any food for urban wildlife. That has worked
up to a point in much of the U.S., Europe, Singapore, Japan, and
here in Hong Kong–but only up to a point.
Even though the food waste remaining accessible to animals in
all of these places is insufficient to support many street dogs and
pigs, all of these places still have abundant feral cats, rats,
crows, and gulls. Hong Kong and parts of Japan also have nuisance
monkeys.
At best, the urban wildlife population can be reduced by
limiting the food supply. Realistically, it cannot be eliminated.
Another option is to try to kill all of the species that
become problematic. This simply does not work, because killing each
animal opens habitat to others, and even if you could kill all of
the birds and mammals, you would only leave more food available to
insects.
Cockroaches have already survived the Devonian extinction,
the Permian extinction and the extinction of the dinosaurs, as well
as the H-bomb testing at Bikini Atoll, so if you want to see the
real-life evolution of “The Cockroach That Ate Cincinnati,” just try
total extermination of all animal life.
The third option is learning to live with urban wildlife, by
replacing alienated, fearful, and dangerous animals with animals we
understand, who understand us.
This is what ABC is all about, as it is called in India, or
TNR, as it is called in the U.S. and Europe.
The idea of either ABC or TNR is to vaccinate and sterilize
at least 70% of the population of street dogs and feral cats, who
are the urban wildlife whose habits are most compatible with those of
humans, so as to maintain disease-free, stable or gradually
diminishing numbers of these animals in the available habitat niches.
In some places, as in much of the U.S., the object is to
allow native species who reproduce much more slowly, and are also
relatively non-problematic, to gradually reclaim habitat from which
they were extirpated decades ago by human development.
In most of Asia, however, the goal is to keep some highly
problematic and dangerous native species from occupying cities in
greater abundance, while minimizing the problems associated with
street dogs and feral cats.
The easiest way to reduce dog and cat problems is to replace
a short-lived and ever-reproducing population with a much more stable
population of animals who are living beyond their difficult
“teenaged” years and becoming assimilated into households as domestic
pets, while continuing to occupy their ecological niche.
Fortuitously, 70% is the effective threshold percentage of
animals of any species who must be vaccinated to prevent the spread
of most contagious diseases, including rabies, and also the
threshold percentage of dogs and cats who must be sterilized to
achieve population stability, with incremental population reduction
occurring as the percentage of sterilized animals increases.
70% is not the target for both vaccination and sterilization
by happy accident.
Sterilization is in effect surgically “vaccinating” animals
against reproduction. The goal is to reduce the vulnerability of the
potential host population to the condition, by reducing the
possibility of transmission to odds so slim that the condition cannot
replicate itself more rapidly than it dies out.
Many of the delegates to this conference have verified
through their own experience that 70% or somewhere close to it is the
magic number, among them Christine and Jeremy Townend of Help In
Suffering in Jaipur, India; Chinny Krishna of the Blue Cross of
India; and Pradeep Kumar Nath of the Visakha SPCA in
Visakhapatnam, India.
In the U.S., the numbers of dogs killed by animal shelters
began falling fast after the percentage of owned pet dogs who were
sterilized reached 67%, in the late 1980s.
The numbers of cats killed by U.S. animal control agencies
began a rapid drop after 1991, when the percentage of pet cats who
were sterilized reached about 85%, which equaled about 60% of the
estimated total U.S. cat population, including ferals.
Since then, the advent of neuter/return to control feral cat
numbers and increasing human acceptance of responsibility for outdoor
cats has blurred the distinction between pets and ferals. Of the
estimated 73 million “pet” cats in the U.S. now, 10 to 15 million
may in truth be fed ferals, who a decade ago would not have been
called “pets.”
During the past 10 years the number of cats who have been
sterilized by U.S. veterinarians each year has been approximately
double the number of pet cats assimilated into households, which
indicates that the U.S. feral cat population today is probably no
more than half what it was in 1991.
This is the same kind of transition that ABC or TNR programs
are already demonstrably accomplishing in Asia.
One strong indication of success, although often read
completely upside down and backward, is that the incidence of
dog-bite is remaining high in India and rapidly rising in China,
even though the incidence of rabies has been very sharply reduced in
both nations.
Free-roaming street dogs relatively seldom bite people,
unless they are rabid, because they are used to the constant
presence of strangers, and soon learn that any threatening behavior
toward humans can be fatal. Instead, they tend to run from any
menacing human approach.
Pet dogs, on the other hand, become highly protective of
the humans they regard as fellow pack members, and also protect the
humans’ property. Instead of running from a perceived threat, they
bite. Thus as more Indian dogs are treated as pets, they respond as
pets–and thus in India, where most dogs still run free, and in the
U.S., where most dogs are confined in yards or houses, the ratio of
humans to dog bites each year that require medical treatment is
identical, at 62 to 1.
Further, 70% of the bites requiring treatment in India are
verifiably committed by pets, according to one recent study. This
also parallels the U.S. experience.
Obviously we need to reduce the incidence of pet dogs biting,
but this is a sociological and behavioral problem, which has
established solutions in the form of appropriate education of both
dogs and humans, and is not to be confused with the issues
pertaining to ABC or TNR.
There will always be those who think killing animals is
cheaper than sterilizing animals, and therefore more appropriate for
developing nations, including much of Asia–even though killing
animals is demonstrably ineffective in doing anything other than
providing patronage employment of dogcatchers.
Some of the people who continue to advocate killing animals
will point to the huge numbers of animals killed by U.S. animal
control agencies throughout most of the 20th century, increasing
every year from 1895, when records were first kept, until circa
1970, when the U.S. was killing 115 dogs and cats per year per 1,000
human residents.
It must be pointed out that the focus of the U.S. animal care
and control strategy on exterminating homeless dogs and cats was an
enormous and very costly failure, costing us close to $2 billion a
year.
In truth, the U.S. really began to control our dog and cat
populations effectively only after gradually abandoning almost a
century of concerted effort to kill them, and turning instead to
high-volume dog and cat sterilization.
Since 1970 the U.S. has reduced population control killing of
dogs and cats by 87%, with a 75% drop since 1985.
What developing nations cannot afford is to spend as long as
we did making the same mistakes we did, before doing what has
finally begun to bring success.
Thank you.
Merritt Clifton
Editor, ANIMAL PEOPLE[/quote]
And that’s the extent of our involvement with the dog feeders. They take care of the animals post-surgery, they pay the vet bills, and they return the animals themselves.
(Thanks to Sean for scoring the regular supply of free food for us!) A foreign lady we now collaborate with used to spend thousands every month feeding and CNRing the odd bitch. Since we started letting her have food for free, she’s been CNRing an average of two to three dogs per month. I’m currently helping her out as she is in the process of CNRing an entire pack of 12 dogs she feeds daily. Now I’d like anyone dare telling her that she is contributing to the stray overpopulation problem. Better yet, I’d like anyone telling me how you could possibly justify issuing her a fine for doing that. :raspberry: