The reality is that street dogs in India are often more active, and sometimes far more aggressive, at nighttime. They often rest quietly during the day to avoid suffering from the extreme heat
I'm also puzzled by what this research wants to prove. That it's Ok to have a large uncontrolled population of feral dogs? No, it's not...
Vaccinate the feral dogs. They will make a queue waging the tail, come to you and eat the vaccine from your own hands in 5 seconds if you show half a sausage. Save lottamoney in healthcare later and human lives. End of the problem. Vote me.
Or if you are more ambitious, caught them, mark the vaccinated dogs with a tatto or a ear tag, and give the poochie the whole sausage before releasing it again at their home, so people can know what dog interactions are safer and what need more care. Thus you avoid losing money vaccinating two times the same dog.
"should kill all the dogs because rabies" is stupid. Ecology models predict that that would spread faster the rabies and would made people less safe in that sense. You want territorial animals remaining in their territory.
The fact that this is such a common idea suggests to me that even people who believe they care about animals in truth treat animals as objects, without any rights or personal interests other than what the person thinks are the animal's interests.
We don't do that kind of thing to humans anymore, neuter them for their own good and the good of their descenants. Why do we do it to animals?
You have a good point.
That's what I get when I edit to add a word in later. 'Kindhearted' was intended to qualify 'immunization'.
On the other hand we do neuter ourselves (some forms of birth control can be considered neutering with different levels of reversibility), but the difference is that it happens with consent and is voluntary.
For the 'social problem' of strays neutering is an acceptable compromise struck between the dog lover and dog hater groups.
I would rather have a stray neutered rather than killed in a kill shelter or worse, stoned on the streets to death. The latter is not uncommon in a few states in my country.
You might be interested in the fact that in India dolphins have some of the human like legal rights. Definitely some progress. Not sure if Orcas would come under the folds of the same law. I dont think Orcas are to be found in Indian territorial waters.
This is a false dichotomy. The kind of people that stone a dog to death, will do gladly the same with a neutered dog. Is just a releasing frustration mechanism. Finding somebody lower in the social scale to pick on him/her, is psychologically comforting in a twisted sense. The ugly truth is that it makes us feel better. The concepts of "good" and "bad people" play a main role and are deeply engraved in human cultures. We do horrible things to "bad people", "nazis" etc, all the time.
But I digress. Is really useful to neuter stray dogs?.
Most probably not. Would be the same as proposing to neuter coyotes. Top predators self regulate its numbers being strongly territorial. Only the alpha pair in a pack is allowed to reproduce, and the space is filled to its capacity, so neutering the rest would not made any difference (just make vets richer). Is just animal cruelty by part of a pool of people unable to deal with basic concepts of being alive, as pain and death, and that secretly yearn for control over other's lives to hide the lack of control over their own lives.
Hard disagree at least in my local context. You seem to harbor quite a strong conviction but uninformed of the situation here. That doesn't help much other than, as you said, 'it makes us feel better'.
Its through adopting these population control measures have locals been able to strike a compromise between, for lack of a better terminology, anti-stray and pro-stray folks. That the strays are neutered and would not by themselves lead to an increase in their numbers have helped persuade residents to be kinder, though somewhat reluctantly.
The number of dead puppies per year have gone down, so have calls to the municipal corporation to exterminate the strays. It may sound harsh, but I will readily take that concrete benefit rather than judgements and opinions from the internet.
> Finding somebody lower in the social scale to pick on him/her, is psychologically comforting in a twisted sense.
This is spot on. I am just thankful that these has gone down some. Funnily enough its not just dog lovers vs those who do not like dogs. There have been instances of setting pet dogs against the strays. So yeah we as people do gratuitously horrible things.
The stray population here has a very different dynamics and replacement sources from Coyote population, so I dont think that example generalizes.
Fair enough. Sorry for reacting reflexively to your wording.
> I would rather have a stray neutered rather than killed in a kill shelter or worse, stoned on the streets to death.
Ideally, we should teach people that it's wrong to kill animals just because they're bothersome. Legislation, social pressure and changing mores can get that message across loud and clear and then we won't have to either neuter or kill strays.
Where I live btw, dogs -strays and not, alike- tend to die not stoned but poisoned. Whether that's on purpose, or the dogs eat something they shouldn't (like rat poison) I have no idea. The word on the street is that people leave poisoned food out on purpose to kill an animal that's causing them trouble (like killing their chickens) and then inevitably kill a couple more that they didn't intend to. I don't know how true that is.
That is of course extremely illegal, but nobody ever gets caught for it.
> Ideally, we should teach people that it's wrong to kill animals just because they're bothersome.
Amen.
> Where I live btw, dogs -strays and not, alike- tend to die not stoned but poisoned.
We had one such case and I have no idea whether that was intentional. I would like to believe that it was not. It was my first experience of seeing one dog grieve another for weeks and then die months after because it had stopped eating.
No comment on dog behaviour or policy in a country I don't know, but basic research (and, I'd argue, most good academic research) is descriptive, not prescriptive.
They are more prone to territorial barking at night, but that's them being good watch-dogs.
I have a rescue from the streets. He is paranoid about bikes and cars coming close.
As most predators do in hot climate. Its a pretty complex topic and its good that some research is done.
Wolfs hunt mostly during night time too, but dogs are not wolfs and despite research from like the 80s where dog behaviour was derived from wolf studies (that actually were mostly done with wolfs in zoos and national parks (Yellowstone was pretty big I think) we know now that these studies fail to explain real wolf behaviour). We just began to understand how wolfs interact with each other in packs in free nature and its fairly complex.
The entire 90s dog trainer used studies about wolfs to explain behaviour and train dogs, often the word dominance is used and that you have to be the "pack leader" for your dog to make him follow your "orders". Which is plain wrong on many levels but would go to far now.
Why do I talk about wolfs? Well, dogs that grew up with humans and get lost (in nature) are known to change behaviour very fast. (It mainly depends on the breed and ofc. character).
They begin to act more like wolves again to the point where they develop shyness in front of people and it has happened that they no longer let themselves be called by their original owner and also have not accepted food from them. It can be very difficult to get them used to humans again.
Obviously, this must be different for dogs that live in urban environments without their/a owner. What is probably not different is that pack structures develop but quite rarely in intra-species "serious" conflicts because they don't need to fight over resources. Most animals fight only if really necessary because even a won fight can lead to death because of injuries.
This is especially true in Northern Canada, where abandoned and neglected pets have (for decades) formed roaming packs that, on average, kill one person per year - usually a child - and leave many others with disfiguring injuries. [0] (An old reference since media has generally pulled way back on these stories, but recent firsthand accounts indicate that there's still an issue.)
Many communities have an annual cull to keep the stray/pack population at bay, but residents from 'southern' cities travel north to adopt and rehabilitate the animals - usually with limited success.
The remoteness and unpopularity of the subject unfortunately hasn't brought about many solutions for the affected communities, and fear even more people abandoning their pets as they return to work may exacerbate the issue.
[0] https://www.rcinet.ca/eye-on-the-arctic/2014/10/17/struggle-...