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Bhutan declares its entire street dog population fully sterilized and vaccinated
- jsbisviewtiful 3y agoWow - great on them! At first I was saddened at the idea of sterilizing that many animals but on further reading the article estimates there are 300 million street dogs across Asia... That's a hard number to swallow.
- throw932490 3y ago[flagged]
- vidarh 3y agoEasier to get people to agree to sterilisation than a cull, I suspect, but sterilisation also has one other effect: It reduces the rate of reproduction of unsterilised animals in same population, who will be less and less likely to stumble upon an unsterilised mate.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
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- altacc 3y agoA factor could have been that Bhutan's population is mostly Buddhist & Hindu, with a relatively high number of vegetarians, so a cull would be objected to for religious reasons as well as the normal "people love dogs" reasons.
- samus 3y agoCulling them only frees up space for stray dogs from the wild (dunno how far Bhutan went to track them down in the woods) or from other countries.
- sMarsIntruder 3y ago> There are approximately 300 million street dogs across Asia Didn’t expect that number honestly.
- csomar 3y agoAsia has 4.5 billion humans. So that works out around 15 persons per dog. Seems quite spot-on given that these dogs will eat on leftovers and whatever humans throw to them. I wonder if they derived the number that way (highly doubt they are id-ing all these dogs).
- sinuhe69 3y agoCompared to “only” 500 millions pigs, the number of dogs is astounding. No wonder many countries also use them as food.
- resolutebat 3y agoThis is quite an achievement, especially considering the magnitude of the street dog population in all neighboring countries (India, Nepal, Tibet).
- autoexec 3y agoThat was an amazing achievement, treating something like 10,000 dogs a year for 15 years! Now that the initiative has ended I hope that some form it continues since maintaining a sterilized and vaccinated population will be a lot easier and less expensive than waiting until things get out of hand again. Outsiders wandering in and escaped pets turned strays have the potential to undo much of their great work.
- wirrbel 3y agoI mean as long as they don't start again too late it should be fine, right? For now, if they catch a dog the chances are high its already treated. So the return of reward is comparably low. Once the unvaccinated/unsterilized population has grown again, it makes sense again to get active. The point would be to not restart again too late.
- ars 3y ago> For now, if they catch a dog the chances are high its already treated. 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.
- Eisenstein 3y ago> Wouldn't there be basically no dogs left in a couple year? You may be amazed how many people don't see pets as responsibilities and either discard them for trivial reasons (like moving house) or let them breed and then dump the litter out to fend for themselves.
- petesergeant 3y agoYeah, 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.
- wirrbel 3y agoOlder cartoons of the west often feature (primarily as a villain) the "dog catcher".
- autoexec 3y agoUsually in cartoons the dogs were simply taken to the pound, which was depicted as being basically "jail for dogs", but I suspect that most of the animals picked up off the street by dog catchers didn't spend a lot of time behind bars.
- khazhoux 3y agoThey'd be sent to a nice ranch upstate, right?
- reportgunner 3y agoBack to the dog factory to be reconfigured into a good boy.
- smegsicle 3y agonext up the street rats
- ars 3y agoI know yours is a joke comment, but without the dogs eating the food (the garbage), some other animal is going to eat it instead. I predict an explosion of rats in another decade.
- throw932490 3y agoNot really. Dogs often topple over garbage bin, and spill content on streets. Some countries use garbage bags, dogs break those. Without dogs, there is a good chance garbage just stays in bins, and gets actually collected!
- ars 3y agoRats are quite good at climbing and chewing - they are very able to get into garbage cans, unless they are metal and latched.
- psunavy03 3y agoMy brain spent about 2.5 seconds wondering how the hell you spay or neuter a rat before giving up.
- clort 3y agoI'm sure I read a [news] story about this many years ago and have wondered what became of it, perhaps these guys? https://senestech.com/contrapest/ https://senestech.com/contrapest/
- pgeorgi 3y agoIt can be done to drosophila, as alluded to in https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3197105/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3197105/
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- masteruvpuppetz 3y agoso in ~5 years time, no street dogs in Bhutan???
- ars 3y agoThe article says they've been doing it for 15 years, so there's something odd about their numbers.
- troupo 3y agoIt'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
- goodpoint 3y agoCitation needed.
- troupo 3y agohttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6940938/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6940938/ Fertility control alone: 12% to 40% population decrease. More effective over longer time spans (up to 20 years) Culling alone: Effective in rapidly reducing population short-term, population replaced through compensatory breeding or migration from other locations https://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/27935/1/Smith_LM_Biology_PhD_2020.pdf https://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/27935/1/Smith_LM_Biology_PhD... Combined CNR and responsible ownership targeted several flows into and between the dog subpopulations: it prevented the street dog population from increasing through births and abandonment, and it increased the adoption of dogs from the shelter dog population to the owned dog population. This combined method had a synergistic effect: neither CNR nor responsible ownership applied in isolation was as effective at reducing street dog population size The key result of this thesis is that methods targeting multiple sources of population increase, such as combined CNR [capture-neuter-release] and responsible ownership campaigns, will be most effective at reducing free-roaming dog population size
- unsupp0rted 3y agoI wish Turkey would do this too. Street dogs gather in packs and periodically attack people: not just small children, they go after grown men and women who are just walking down the street during daylight hours. This is true in major cities, like Ankara. 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.
- INTPenis 3y agoIn Thailand street dogs have learned to fear the sound of an electric tazer. 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.
- tim333 3y agoAlso in most such countries if you pick up a rock as if to throw it at them it scares them off as the locals often throw rocks quite effectively.
- signal11 3y agoThis happens in India[1,2] too, and rabies cases are sadly all too common there, so I applaud Bhutan for its success. 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-debate-intl-hnk/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/01/india/india-stray-dog-attack-... [2] https://scroll.in/article/1056464/why-is-india-seeing-so-much-rage-against-street-dogs https://scroll.in/article/1056464/why-is-india-seeing-so-muc...
- jl6 3y ago100% is a big achievement in street dog unavailability - much harder than, say, 99.999%. In k-nines (un)availability, the cost usually increases by 10 * k to increment k by 1. 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.
- the_common_man 3y ago> k-nines Intentional pun? :)
- jl6 3y agoSsh we're not supposed to make jokes here.
- throwaway167 3y agoDon't let me interupt.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- 0xDEAFBEAD 3y agoYeah I'm not sure how they would even know if it's 100% vs 99.999%
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- paganel 3y agoIt’s going to be just us and the pod in the not so distant feature, no need for other forms of being in the world to be around us. And then people will keep posting about their depression medication and about increasing suicide rates.
- Etheryte 3y agoYou should try actually reading the linked article, what they've done is good both for us and for the dogs. Unless you like dogs who are malnourished, unfed and have rabies.
- paganel 3y agoOf course, dead dogs and no dogs at all are better than alive dogs, which is to say that I stand by my point. 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.
- chimen 3y agoBy name I'd say you're romanian. Certainly you must know of the 2 kids that died there to stray dogs in the recent years right? One of them died in a parc. Also, why are you inserting yourself in a discussion about an article without reading the article?
- paganel 3y agoYes, I'm Romanian, yes, I know about those two kids (only two?), yes, I've run away from stray dogs when I was a kid more and once, and, yes, my dad himself has the mark of a dog bite on his inner calf (which he got when he was around 5 years of age). > Also, why are you inserting yourself in a discussion about an article without reading the article? Because of my direct lived experience with stray dogs (granted, not in Central Asia but in Eastern Europe), which I'm pretty much sure the author of the article didn't have, nor most of the people reading said article. And because I've already read similar articles countless of times, for more than 15-20 years now (just web search for Brigitte Bardot and Romania), at some point you've read one you've read them all.
- weinzierl 3y agoCongratulations! Rabies is such a scary disease but these vaccination campaigns do work. Germany, Estonia, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Austria and the Czech Republic became officially rabies free in 2003 after many years of vaccinating wild foxes and all the red rabies warning signs of my childhood are finally gone.
- progbits 3y agoVaccination campaigns are great but can you explain how you can declare countries rabies free without doing the same for their land neighbors? 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?
- londons_explore 3y agoYou have to keep vaccinating... Luckily, vaccination by dropping meat from a plane is a pretty effective way to vaccinate all the wild animals in a wide area.
- quitit 3y agoYou are right: borders don't matter - in reality the disease is eradicated well beyond the borders. Also keep in mind that many animals aren't great travellers, especially so if infected by rabies. 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 https://www.cdc.gov/rabies/resources/countries-risk.html
- samus 3y agoGeographical borders probably help a lot. Stray dogs mostly stay around humans where food is much easier to come by, so there is probably no significant flow through the woods. And since the existing dog population doesn't suddenly disappear, there is no opening for strays from other countries to move in.
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- _giorgio_ 3y agoWhy do you even need to have a street dog population?
- vbezhenar 3y agoNobody's need to have street dog population, it just happens and requires significant resources to deal with.
- paulluuk 3y agoAre you asking where stray dogs come from?
- lotophage 3y agoI believe they're asking, "why go to the effort when 'euthanizing' them would be easier and cheaper?"
- samus 3y agoCountries for sure aren't like "Let's have a population of rabid stray dogs. Wouldn't it be nice". Although they can be useful as they get rid of animal carcasses on the streets. But they have to be taken care of, else there numbers become overwhelming and they might pick up and spread rabies.
- hrkucuk 3y agoI don't know about Bhutan but street animals (mostly dogs & cats) is very common in Turkiye. From cultural point of view we see them as real residents of the place, we are taking up their land. So we are committed to treat them and feel responsible for their care as well. From a practical point of view, like other commentators suggested, they take care of the habitat - cats prevent rodents from going overpopulated etc. And they are cute and friendly and nice to have around!
- pcdoodle 3y agoI appreciate this. HN scares me sometimes.
- stef25 3y agoQuite the achievement. Many years ago on a Thai beach there were a few stray dogs and the locals said one was called "Balls" because he was the only one that they couldn't sterilize. Every time the vet arrived Balls would smell him a mile away and just bolt, disappearing for a few hours.
- crotchfire 3y ago[dead]
- cheschire 3y agoIt's sunrise and a vet stands at the edge of a parking lot, at the top of a short flight of stairs leading down to the beach below. Off in the distance a few hundred meters away, a dog jogs off down the empty beach. The vet, arms hanging by his side and feeling dejected, simply says "Balls..." and turns away.
- blackle 3y agoThe sound effect of a Disco Elysium skill chimed in my head when I read this
- photon_lines 3y agoKnowing how easily even the smallest things torture me, I deliberately avoid contact with them. A cloud passing in front of the sun is enough to make me suffer. How then should I not suffer in the darkness of the endlessly overcast sky of my own life? With Balls running down that sandy beach and humping any hope for my irreverent and everlasting search for peace? My everlasting search for isolation?
- NikkiA 3y agoAdopting a US approach and developing a barrett M107 compatible tranq dart would probably solve that problem. 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.
- _8j50 3y agoI hate this so much. Humans are a disease when considering only things like this. 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).
- krowek 3y agoNot every place on Earth has the same weather through the year as those countries you mention. Dogs aren't really animals born to live in the wild, if a dog has to go through really extreme temperatures, has no food or water, isn't that pain and suffering as well?
- _8j50 3y agoYes, life is pain and suffering. You feed and shelter them, you don't mutilate their bodies. If you were hungry and starving, would you want your balls chopped off so you don't make babies? Or would you want shelter and food? Neutering isn't free. You can create dog parks/sanctuaries and collect leftover food from people and restaurants (tons of it) in exchange for tax relief or just breed animals they can hunt and ear in the park.
- krowek 3y agoWouldn't sheltering and gathering dogs which aren't neutered in the same space an occasion for them to reproduce themselves and increase in number? "You can create dog parks/sanctuaries and collect leftover food from people and restaurants", is this in practice somewhere? I ask not to sound annoying or pedantic, just from the deepest curiosity. Animals' care has been always a problem I want to help with, so I'm open to any ideas.
- curation 3y agoTblisi Georgia does this as well. The dogs are ear tagged and are sort of like the community pets.
- _yb2s 3y agoIt is extremely cruel to neuter an adult male dog and release it. They will have fatigue, lethargy, and weakness that will slowly kill them. They lose all “fight,” energy, and will to live. It is nothing like neutering a dog before it matures. 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.
- seattle_spring 3y agoIt's widely known to wait until a dog is fully grown before sterilization nowadays. Getting them neutered or spayed as a puppy tends to lead to more widespread bone problems, especially hip displasia. Do you have any literature that supports what you are claiming?
- _yb2s 3y agoNo, the vast majority of knowledge out there has never been studied scientifically. If you reject knowledge that isn't "in literature" you are flying blind in life... even scientists can't do that in their own research. 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).
- antonyt 3y agoThe post title feels grammatically off in a way I'm struggling to articulate. I think it's the difference between "declares <object> <adjective>" and "declares that <clause>". Examples of the former: - Researchers declare food unhealthy. - Invaders declare territory theirs. I think my problem is that the former is used in contexts that are either subjective or abstract, whereas the latter is just and indication that somebody has said something. 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.