[autoexec]

That 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]

I 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]

> 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]

> 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]

Yeah, 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.

[samus]

Depends how affordable DNA tests are. For a developing country, sterilization and vaccination might be cheaper than tracking every stray dog to their or their parent's owner. Policy can also make this infeasible if, for example, dog registration is too expensive in the first place for owners.

[progbits]

It might be surprisingly cheap. Prague was doing DNA matching on dog poop in the streets to fine owners for not cleaning up.

I think there were some problems from people breaking the poop bins and scattering the contents everywhere to reduce trust in the system ("it's not my fault, I cleaned up, someone took it out of the bin") but that wouldn't be a problem for strays right?

[FirmwareBurner]

>Wouldn't there be basically no dogs left in a couple year?

No. Plenty of people still won't sterilize their pets and abandon their litter in the street or some just run away or are lost or abandoned by their owners, therefore the stray dog population will never be absolute zero.

[shiroiuma]

I don't get it. Why not just euthanize them? Surely that would be cheaper than sterilizing and vaccinating them all, and the benefits would be seen sooner.

[striking]

You actually want the sterilized strays to remain so that they put pressure on the resources that would otherwise feed the unsterilized strays. That suppresses the stray population even further.

Also, wtf?

[cnity]

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.

[striking]

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.

My "also, wtf" stands.

[cnity]

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.

[striking]

Setting aside the fact that I'd be witness to less deaths because I've chosen a more effective protocol for population control, I think letting them live out their lives isn't a net negative. Why would I expend energy ending lives if they don't impact mine?

Granted, there are times when euthanasia would be necessary. For example, feral dog populations in areas where the vulture population has died off, where they carry disease and attack passersby and the supply of food is basically uncontrollable, I get it. But that's a case I personally would preemptively qualify if I were considering it.

[samus]

In countries with well-managed stray dog populations, people actually feed them, and they get rid of carcasses and other leftovers on the street. Their life might be harsh, but not entirely unpleasant. In countries with unmanaged populations, people will be harsh towards them and mistreat them. And they will also be more aggressive towards humans in return.

[t-3]

If a government had a goal to prevent humans from reproducing and forcibly sterilized and cynically used the population they could reach to pressure and control the population they couldn't, it would be called genocide.

[okasaki]

Plenty of people won't have or will delay having children because they can't find stable housing.

[pookha]

You want packs of stray dingo dogs running around your kids and your homes? I see no value in that. Seems more intuitive for the community at large to use a shelter-system...When I was ten or eleven I nearly got mauled by a seventy pound stray dog that was fighting my neighbors dog. Would have made no difference had that thing been vaccinated.

[shiroiuma]

This is exactly why stray dogs shouldn't be allowed to exist. They're a threat to the community. We don't have them at all here in Japan, as far as I can tell; we do have real wild animals, like bears and boars, that sometimes threaten and attack people, but that's normally only in rural places, and those are actual wild animals, not feral pets or invasive species. We also have stray cats, but while one might argue those are a threat to some native animal species like birds, they're certainly not a threat to humans.

[Reubachi]

Who funds the shelter system, and where do the dogs end up?

It's hard for a small municipality with a stray problem to justify a facility that is entirely dedicated to the bureaucracy of scheduled death. This is a tale as old as time and the end result is not a happy one.

The term "kill shelter" is much more common than "shelter" because by nature a shelter is temporary housing before euthanization resources are available/confirmed.

[striking]

Read my sibling reply from 3 hours before yours: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38175512

[koolba]

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.

[samus]

The populations will just rebound unless you really manage to euthanize all of them. Sterilizing and vaccinating takes care of the problem.

Unless the problem really got out of hand, it's not just "some people" who oppose a total cull. Even if people silently approve of the cull, one will find much less volunteers for such an effort than for a large-scale sterilization and vaccination program.

[shiroiuma]

Why "wtf?" They don't have stray dogs everywhere. They don't exist here in Japan; any stray dogs are seized, and presumably euthanized. Why have nuisance animals roaming around that cause a lot of problems and attack people? Do you think it's somehow a good thing to have stray dogs? wtf?

[Kye]

It's the same reason releasing sterilized mosquitoes of the few dangerous-to-humans species is so effective.

[krowek]

This is a very good question because it touches many grounds. What's the humanist position on this? What's the (many) religion's position on this? And I'd also say, economically speaking, what's more viable? To euthanize them or to sterilize them?

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.

[wouldbecouldbe]

Bhutan is deeply buddhist

[martopix]

Hopefully you don't have to be a Buddhist for that. Also I don't really see the advantage compared to sterilization.

[wouldbecouldbe]

Even though in certain Buddhist countries animals get slaughtered for food, taking lives of animals is a big thing in Buddhism.

There is fundamentally no difference between animal consciousness and human in the buddhist view.

But to take it to a human level: you dont see a difference in (chemical) castration of people with mental disability and killing them?

[throwaway2037]

    taking lives of animals is a big thing in Buddhism

How do explain (South) Korea and Japan that eat plenty of meat and have a Buddhist majority? Sri Lanka also has lots of Buddhists, and also eats lots of meat. This seems like nonsense to me.

[wouldbecouldbe]

Yeah I put that caveat in there.

The himalayas they also traditionally kill animals for food. They basically consumed 3 things barley, yak products (meat and milk) and tea.

They didn't have much choice; was hard to grow anything else up in the mountains.But they were conscious about it and still careful but other animal lives.

It's not only because they care about the animal, but also very much about they are afraid of the karma they create for themselves.

Now in the refugee areas they prefer to buy their meat from the Islamic community ironically enough.

[autoexec]

The first precept of Buddhism is not to kill humans or animals. Not everybody is going to be crazy strict about it, but that core value of not taking life is there.

Personally, I eat meat too, and I'm also not a huge fan of needlessly killing dogs, and I'm not even Buddhist! I feel like there's a middle ground where I can care about animals, respect life, and also have a cheeseburger. I'm certain some people will find that to be hypocritical, but it's really not a huge gotcha to me.

[theonemind]

Buddhism in Bhutan is different. I think it's the state religion, has monarchy support, it's Vajrayana (very few countries have Vajrayana as their major Buddhism), and religion is less "background noise" in Bhutan than somewhere like Japan, a kind of Buddhist-Shinto mash-up dissolving into atheism.

I think Buddhism in Bhutan likely did influence this course of action.

[dncornholio]

Animal welfare is a thing in Buddhism though. India has animal welfare in their constitution. Buddhism is also the only religion that notes animal rights.

I think you can compare it with Christians, there are plenty of sinners.

[zmgsabst]

Why is forcibly sterilizing animals better than forcibly sterilizing humans, in such a view?

Or in their own framework, did Bhutan just engage in genocide against an unwanted demographic?

[dncornholio]

If we believe that animals were created by someone for men, it would follow that men were also created for animals since some animals do eat human flesh.

[martopix]

I think you misread my comment.

[pvaldes]

Is a solution, but not the best one. Would guarantee to propagate any disease much far away in no time.

Street dogs provide also some services that are valuable like rodent control or cleaning roadkills