Last time I checked there were no border checks for foxes crossing from France, Poland etc. :)
Is the assumption they don't have suitable habitats outside those countries? Or how do you stop backsliding?
Claiming eradication is based on continued evidence from robust and internationally recognised monitoring and eradication programmes.
See the "Methods" and the footnotes sections from this CDC page: https://www.cdc.gov/rabies/resources/countries-risk.html
Luckily, vaccination by dropping meat from a plane is a pretty effective way to vaccinate all the wild animals in a wide area.
Might be an expensive overkill for a single dog, but c'est la vie, it'll boost the GDP dumping all that money into mil dev anyway.
Wouldn't there be basically no dogs left in a couple year?
So just keep the program going for another 5 years or so and they wouldn't be catching very many dogs in the first place.
Also, wtf?
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.
Street dogs provide also some services that are valuable like rodent control or cleaning roadkills
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).
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.
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.
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.
Do you have any literature that supports what you are claiming?
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).
Didn’t expect that number honestly.
But good thing that we sterilized those 150000 dogs, anything else would have been inhumane [2]
[1] https://faunalytics.org/global-animal-slaughter-statistics-a... [2] Sorry, I'm bitter.
Examples of the former:
- Researchers declare food unhealthy.
- Invaders declare territory theirs.
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.
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?
HN scares me sometimes.
[0] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/People_for_Animals
[1] - https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/meerut/retired-doct...
[2] - https://www.deccanchronicle.com/nation/in-other-news/060323/...
But at least they got a huge leg up on the problem.
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.
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.
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.
It's a hard life out there for those dogs.
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.
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/01/india/india-stray-dog-attack-...
[2] https://scroll.in/article/1056464/why-is-india-seeing-so-muc...
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.
The ones you see sitting around in the same spot on multiple days are eartagged, but there are a lot more transient ones.
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.
Intentional pun? :)
And then people will keep posting about their depression medication and about increasing suicide rates.
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.