[quote=“jdsmith”]So, this comes back to my other point, the one closer to the topic, how can you justify SUSTAINING the stray dog population? …
…your alternative seems to be CNR and sustain them…
To me that is a bit ineffective as there will still be diseased dogs running around the parks; and will people only feed neutered animals? Impossible…
I am ALL for education,but the fact of the matter is that the dogs are STILL going to be there for years, even if ALL of them are neutered and no new dogs are introduced into the population…
I just don’t see how letting the stray population die out on its own, naturally, is a plausible method of ridding the parks and streets of the dogs in a timely manner…
Either we want them gone altogether, all off the streets, all out of the parks, or we don’t.[/quote]
I’m not sure you entirely understand the issue and the effectiveness of CNR; you understand the problem well, though.
CNR (with education) is the ONLY known method that REALLY works in reducing the stray population … it just so happens to also be the most humane.
With CNR, you treat the sick dogs. All are vaccinated, and all are desexed (as many as you can catch, anyways, and at least 67 percent; this has never been a problem). No dogs are spreading disease. By vaccinating the bulk of the population, you eradicate those diseases; by removing dogs entirely from the habitat, you are leaving the majority unvaccinated and therefore disease would spread (the same model as in human diseases.) The same goes for neutering: if you want to truly control the population, you MUST have the majority of the population unable to breed. If you remove all the dogs you can catch, the remainder will all be able to breed, and they will.
If you want dogs off the street and out of your public areas, you need to deal with the people who put them there, catch and desex and vaccinate the majority, and slowly reduce the availability of food to those you can’t catch. That’s it. Catch and kill may feel good for some people and may make some officials look like they’re doing something, but it is ineffective in anything other than the immediate short term.
Here are some links that may help (India employed the catch-and-kill method that some of you seem to love so much for over a century, and it made matters WORSE; CNR with education is fixing the problem):
wsdindia.org/FAQs/faqs.htm
karmayog.com/dogs/sterlization.htm
And from a now defunct site about the stray problem in Turkey:
[quote]Neuter And Return
There are only 3 ways to solve stray dog problems:
* To kill or remove every single fertile bitch.
* To remove the food source, i.e. somehow prevent animal lovers feeding unsupervised dogs and remove all rubbish from the streets so that the dogs starve to death.
* Or "Neuter and Return".
Extermination campaigns, for example the indiscriminate poisoning or shooting of dogs at night irrespective of whether they are neutered and vaccinated or indeed pets with owners, have never succeeded anywhere in the world.
‘Neuter and Return’, the policy advocated by the World Health Organisation and the World Society for the Protection of Animals, solves the problem permanently, although dogs have to be tolerated on the streets for 5-8 years for it to succeed. Providing it is implemented to the edge of the urban area it is however a permanent and humane solution which politicians can be proud of.
“In the long term, control of reproduction is by far the most effective strategy of dog population management.” - W.H.O., Geneva, Guidelines for Dog Population Management, page 72.
‘Neuter and Return’ must be implemented in conjunction with education campaigns to explain the importance of neutering, of vaccination and of preventing dogs from reproducing.
Turkey needs to invest money and effort now to solve the problem forever.
Stray dog populations anywhere depend solely on the amount of food available. Nature adjusts the population to the carrying capacity of the territory. If just one fertile female escapes being killed or captured she can breed up to 67,000 offspring in 6 years. That is why killing dogs can never succeed unless every single female is exterminated. That is why Turkish streets are still full of dogs.
If however the carrying capacity of an area is filled with sterile animals the population will gradually die out, providing no fertile dogs can infiltrate from surrounding areas and providing freshly abandoned dogs are collected by dog wardens, police and residents (as in developed countries).
“Removal and killing of dogs should never be considered as the most effective way of dealing with a problem of surplus dogs in the community: it has no effect whatsoever on the root cause of the problem.” – Guidelines for Dog Population Management, W.H.O. Geneva 1990 (page 74).
“In none of the study areas did the elimination of dogs by any method have any significant long term effect on dog population size.” –Report of W.H.O. Consultation on Dog Ecology Studies related to Rabies Control, Geneva, 22-25 February 1988 (page 11).
[/quote]
One important point: for CNR to work, it must be conducted within a specific population and within a limited time frame; randomly neutering and returning stray dogs keeps the population down to a degree but does not constitute a truly effective solution.
In a nutshell, fining people who feed strays is not going to solve the problem. There are other factors that must be considered and dealt with effectively if we are ever to see Taiwan’s streets mostly free of dogs.
