ANIMAL PEOPLE is the leading independent newspaper providing original investigative coverage of animal protection worldwide. Founded in 1992, ANIMAL PEOPLE has no alignment or affiliation with any other entity.

ESSENTIAL DESTINATIONS

CLICK HERE Most Recent Issues The Eberle Mess Search this Site! Important Materials Cool Links Watchdog Report Subscribe Online (safe) Spanish Edition French Edition AP articles Sampler AP Masthead The LEWYT Awards EMAIL US

[Costa Rica trains more veterinarians per capita than any other nation. Many graduates of Costa Rican programs go on to work in the U.S. Although specifically directed at the Costa Rican audience, this talk is really a basic primer on humane animal control for anyone, anywhere.]

By Merritt Clifton, editor, ANIMAL PEOPLE.

Thank you for this opportunity to address you. I am a news reporter. My philosophy, as a reporter, is borrowed from the early 20th century U.S. newspaper baron William Randolph Hearst--who, by the way, was a strong advocate for animals. Hearst stated that the purpose of news reporting is to, "Comfort the afflicted, afflict the comfortable, print the news, and raise hell." My personal specialties are investigative reporting and environmental reporting.

The creed for investigative reporters, otherwise known as muckrakers, is "Follow the money." The creed on the environmental beat, called "the poop beat" in newsrooms, is "Follow your nose."

After muckraking, following the money, and following my nose fulltime on the animal protection beat since 1988 in partnership with ANIMAL PEOPLE publisher Kim Bartlett, it is very clear to me, based on the accumulation of cold hard statistical data, that the most cost-effective approach to dog and cat care and control, the most ecological approach, the approach most effectively addressing public health concerns, and the kindest approach, are all one and the same.

Accordingly, I am here to explain to veterinarians how to make much more money than you have ever dreamed you could earn.

I am also here to explain to taxpayers how to save money.
I am here to explain to environmentalists how to protect endangered species from feral dogs and cats.
I am here to explain to public health officials how to protect your citizens from zoonotic disease.
I am here to endorse the intuition of people who love animals that an emphasis on saving lives and treating each animal with respect and kindness is the approach that will over time bring you the greatest amount of community approval and cooperation, and will bring the greatest public contributions to animal welfare charities.

Finally, I am here to encourage you to realize that the Latin American humane community and veterinary community already have some of the very best ideas about dog and cat care and control that we have encountered anywhere in the world, and have already accomplished some enormously impressive results in almost eradicating canine rabies in some regions through high-volume free vaccination. These successful anti-rabies projects can become the models for successful efforts to prevent dog and cat overpopulation.

Unfortunately, some cities and some nations still resort to poisoning dogs and cats in the streets. This is completely ineffective in preventing overpopulation and is environmentally very dangerous, since endangered predators and scavengers may also ingest the poison--and occasionally, children do.

Some places still shoot dogs and cats. Investigating the circumstances, ANIMAL PEOPLE has discovered that usually governments send troops out to shoot dogs in times of civil unrest, when the presence of the dogs provides a pretext for putting armed men on the streets, whose real purpose is intimidating demonstrators. The Chinese describe this as "Killing the dog to scare the monkey."

We have also seen recent video of municipal workers in rural Brazil gassing homeless dogs and cats with unfiltered and uncooled car exhaust, a procedure which has been outlawed in most of North America and Europe for 20 to 30 years.

In addition, we have recently heard that one of the biggest cities in Brazil continues to kill animals with a decompression chamber. That appallingly cruel killing method has been outlawed almost everywhere in the world for just as long.

We have heard rumors, still unconfirmed, that homeless dogs and cats are still electrocuted in parts of Latin America. The Royal SPCA of Great Britain experimented with electrocuting animals from approximately 1885 until about 1928, before concluding that it could never be considered acceptably humane by British standards. They then exported the Royal SPCA electrocution machines to India, where the last of them were dismantled in 1997, and Pakistan, where one may still be in use.

I believe all of us here would agree that cruelty is cruelty, no matter where it occurs, and there is no more excuse for cruelty in a poor nation than in a rich one. A wealthy nation has no moral authority to export cruelty to the poor; neither should the poor be coerced or fooled into accepting cruel methods of dealing with either animals or people when a rich nation asserts that this should be done.

It is especially shocking that cruel killing of dogs and cats continues in Latin America when much of Brazil, much of Argentina, Uroguay, and Costa Rica have all virtually eliminated rabies as a public health threat, without resorting to massacres of street dogs and cats as routine public policy.

Asia, eastern Europe, and Africa are all a long way behind the accomplishments of much of Latin America in this regard. The knowledge exists within Latin America, if it is used, to completely eradicate rabies from Central America, South America, and the Caribbean, and to prevent all of the other problems associated with dog-and-cat overpopulation, if the lessons from these successful anti-rabies campaigns can be broadly applied.
Just before the October 2001 edition of ANIMAL PEOPLE went to press, a few days before our departure to come here, we learned--and reported--that a 9-year-old boy had apparently died from rabies on September 29 at the Children's Hospital here in San Jose.

Whether or not further testing confirms that rabies was the cause, and whether or not dogs had anything to do with it, the mere public perception that a child has died from rabies which might have come from a dog bite has the potential to present a real challenge to the idea advocated by Dr. Vicente and Christine Crawford here that the existence of conventional dog and cat population control departments with conventional U.S.-style animal shelters increases pet abandonment and killing, and postpones the inevitable need to provide free vaccination and sterilization to feral animals and pets of the poor.

Just over a year ago, Dr. Vicente explained to those of us who attended the No-Kill Conference in Tucson, Arizona, that "Building shelters is a diversion of resources that a poor nation cannot afford."

Dr. Vicente was right. Building the kind of multi-billion-dollar animal care and control facilities that the U.S. and some other nations have is a diversion of resources that a poor nation cannot afford--and neither can the U.S.

Common perception around the world, promoted by some public officials and representatives of humane societies who really ought to know better than to repeat such rot, is that the U.S. has almost completely eliminated rabies in dogs and cats through:

1) Exterminating stray dogs, to the extent that free-roaming dogs are scarcely seen any more in much of the country;
2) Exterminating as many feral cats as animal control departments can capture; and
3) Enforcing laws requiring that all pet dogs must be vaccinated.

This is the actual current data on compliance with the dog licensing laws, which are the enforcement mechanism for the legal vaccination requirements:

Type of regulation West Midwest Northeast South
Dog licence, intact: $28.21 $11.72 $ 9.72 $17.86
Dog license, altered: $10.50 $ 4.70 $ 4.58 $ 5.93
Dog licensing compliance: 24% 28% 32% 10%
(28% national average)

The U.S. licensing fees for sterilized dogs are on average close to the minimum legal wage for one hour. For dogs who remain capable of breeding, the license fees are close to the regionally adjusted average wage of U.S. workers.

In other words, dog licensing is affordable for almost any employed person.

Yet the national rate of compliance with dog licensing is only 28%.

In fact, more than 70% of U.S. dogs and owned cats are vaccinated against rabies. In addition, nearly 70% of the owned dogs are sterilized, as are more than 85% of the owned cats. It must be clearly understood, however, that these animals are not vaccinated and sterilized because the law requires it. Laws that are obeyed by barely one person in four have hardly any discernible effect at all. Rather, U.S. pet dogs and cats are vaccinated and sterilized because people who keep pet dogs and cats have been convinced by veterinarians they know and trust, by humane organizations, and by their friends and neighbors, that vaccinating and sterilizing pets is the socially responsible and considerate thing to do--especially if a person respects the life and health of the pet.

Our progress has been a triumph of advertising, in other words, rather than of coercion.

The focus of the U.S. animal care and control strategy on exterminating homeless dogs and cats, meanwhile, has been an enormous and very costly failure, costing us approximately $600 million per year at present just in tax-funded expenditure, and close to $2 billion a year when the diversion of charitable contributions to capturing and disposing of homeless dogs and cats is factored in.

In truth, the U.S.--which was never very tolerant of dogs at large--really only began to reduce the numbers of dogs and feral cats who were running at large after abandoning almost a century of concerted effort to kill homeless dogs and cats by any means possible, and turning instead to high-volume low-cost and free sterilization.

It is also a matter of record--and I will give you the hard statistics in a moment--that canine rabies was eliminated in the U.S. while the numbers of free-roaming dogs and cats were still very close to an all-time high, and were still several years from beginning the rapid drop that we have seen over the past few decades.

There will always be those who think killing animals is cheaper than sterilizing animals, and therefore more appropriate for developing nations. On a 1-to-1 basis, if you only consider the cost of killing one animal versus the cost of sterilizing one animal, they will be right--but killing animals just creates habitat vacancies, which enables the survivors to successfully raise more puppies and kittens.

Accordingly, one must look at the big picture: not just the cost per animal handled, but also at the possible gain to be had if that animal is never born.

Succinctly put, killing cats, dogs, and other mammals in a futile attempt to achieve permanent population reduction is an approach repeatedly attempted by just about every government of every nation on every continent, sometimes on a continuous basis since the Middle Ages, when cat pogroms helped to accelerate the spread of the black rats whose fleas carried bubonic plague. Even after the Black Death killed a third of the human population of Europe, the fallacy of attempting to exterminate cats was not understood, and the civic officials of London repeated the same mistake about 300 years later.

In fact, no extermination program directed at any fast-breeding mammal species such as dogs, cats, coyotes, deer, rabbits, pigs, rats or mice has ever achieved more than short-term results in a mainland habitat.

And nowhere did it fail more obviously than in the United States.
Two ecological laws work against successful extermination:

1) Nature abhors a void. Open a habitat niche by exterminating the occupants, and something will promptly fill it.

2) Mammals raise litters of size varying according to food availability. This was one of our major evolutionary advantages over the dinosaurs and birds, whose egg clutch size was and is more-or-less fixed at a relatively low number. Among mammals, lowering food competition accelerates the fecundity of the surviving population. Larger litters are born; more of each litter survive. Birds which might compete with some of the mammals for the habitat simply cannot reproduce as rapidly to fill a void--so what happens is that exterminating the mammals usually just results in proliferation of their major prey species, such as mice and rats, followed by reoccupation of the habitat by more of the same species of mammalian predators who were just exterminated, moving in from other areas.

The New York City animal control statistics offer an excellent longterm illustration. From 1895, when records first were kept, until 1962, no U.S. city more vigorously exterminated stray dogs and cats. Yet the number of dogs and cats killed rose every year, topping 100,000 for the first time in 1908 (after approximately 75 years of killing strays and 13 years of record-keeping). The New York City numbers continued to rise each and every year, peaking at 250,000 in 1962 and remaining at that level until 1966.

Every year, no matter how many animals were killed the year before, more were found at large to kill. San Francisco also began keeping records of animal control killing in 1895, and saw the same trend. Record-keeping started much later in most other cities, but not one U.S. city of any size ever achieved a lasting downward trend in dog and cat killing or in stray dog and cat pickups until more than 30 years after the last major U.S. outbreak of canine rabies, which occurred in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

In 1957, Friends of Animals started the first low-cost dog and cat sterilization project in the U.S. in the New York City area. After 10 years of effort, it was fixing enough animals per year to stop the growth of the stray population, and started branch programs in other parts of the country. I believe Dr. Gissendammer here became involved in that effort in the 1970s or early 1980s.

Other organizations including the American SPCA, Fund for Animals, and North Shore Animal League America meanwhile also began doing high-volume sterilization surgery in and around New York City.
Thus, from 1967 through 1995 the number of strays killed in New York City dropped every year, hitting a low of 40,000.

Since 1995 the total has fluctuated between 40,000 and 45,000, and the New York City ratio of animals killed to human population has been the second lowest in the U.S., at about 5.8 per 1,000 people.

The San Francisco SPCA began doing high-volume low-cost and free sterilization in 1984, and has achieved even more impressive results. The San Francisco Department of Animal Care and Control and San Francisco SPCA now kill only 2.6 animals per 1,000 human residents, which is by far the lowest rate of dog and cat killing recorded in North America.

San Antonio, just 10% of the size of New York City, meanwhile had no low-cost spay/neuter program until 1998. In recent years San Antonio has killed 40,000 stray dogs and cats per year, the same as New York City--and the per capita rate of killing in San Antonio has nonetheless never been lower.

Meanwhile, the few parts of the U.S. which still have occasional canine rabies outbreaks, like Texas, South Carolina, and Alabama, often have animal control intake and killing rates of approximately four times the U.S. norm of about 16 dogs and cats killed per 1,000 human residents.

Hidalgo County, Texas, which has some of the most militant organized veterinary opposition to low-cost and free dog and cat sterilization in the U.S., kills 64 dogs and cats per 1,000 human residents. Kershaw County, South Carolina, kills 73 dogs and cats per 1,000 human residents, and the city of Mobile, Alabama, kills 70 dogs and cats per 1,000 human residents.

In each of these very backward places, the official emphasis is still upon killing instead of sterilization, because the city officials persist in the erroneous belief that killing is cheaper.

The most important lesson here is that despite the obvious fact that it is less expensive to kill any one animal than to vaccinate and sterilize the animal, you can kill animals to infinity and not get rid of large free-roaming populations.

Street dog and feral cat populations can be eliminated--by sterilizing them, and allowing them to hold their habitat with diminished reproductive capacity while addressing the conditions that permit them to proliferate. In the long run, the only really effective way to eliminate street dogs is to eliminate their food sources by improving public sanitation, introducing refrigeration, and getting rid of uncovered trash dumps.

As long as you have rats, open-air disposal of either animal or human feces, decomposing animal carcasses in the streets, and large amounts of easily accessible food waste, you will have street dogs, because you will be maintaining the conditions which are conducive to their reproduction.

Almost the same observations pertain to cats. In regions with abundant street dogs, feral cats tend to be few. They live on rooftops and are mostly nocturnal, because dogs outcompete them for the ground-level daytime food sources--and dogs also control the feral cat population by killing cats, especially kittens.

When you eliminate street dogs, however, cats claim the habitat. In warm climates, cats have approximately twice the reproductive capacity of dogs. If you think you have a lot of dogs to deal with now, just wait and see what happens should you manage to reduce the dog numbers substantially without doing anything to eliminate the food sources and slow the fecuncity of cats.

As recently as 1960, 90% of the animals handled by U.S. animal care and control departments were dogs. Free-roaming dogs were still commonly seen all over the U.S. until the mid-1980s, and feral cats were still relatively few. No one even counted them. In some states, like Connecticut, cats were considered to be so unproblematic that animal control departments did not even have a mandate to collect cats until 1991.

As dog overpopulation and free-roaming dogs were eliminated, however, we found out about cats the hard way. By 1985, the numbers of dogs coming into U.S. shelters had stablized, showing no real increase in about five years--but cats now made up half the incoming volume of animals. By 1995, the number of dogs coming into U.S. shelters was less half of what it had been in 1985. Two-thirds to three-quarters of the total numbers of animals received and animals killed were cats.

Between 1985 and today, the total number of dogs and cats killed in U.S. animal shelters has declined from 17.8 million to just 4.6 million, but if we were only dealing with dogs, pet overpopulation would be almost history. Most of the dogs killed in the U.S. these days are seriously ill, seriously injured, or are judged to be too dangerous to adopt out to a new home. Most of the cats, on the other hand, are quite healthy, and are killed only because no one wants them.

The numbers would be even more overwhelming except that removing free-roaming dogs from U.S. streets also allowed the proliferation of coyotes. Recent studies of urban coyote feeding habits by researchers at San Diego State University in California and Arizona State University in Tucson discovered that cats make up about one fifth of the coyotes' diet.

I call coyotes "nature's animal control officers." Having seen how swifly coyotes dispatch the cats they eat, I guarantee that a cat killed by a coyote suffers far less than a cat caught in a trap, kept in a cage in terrified proximity to barking dogs for several days in case someone comes to claim the cat as a missing pet, and is finally killed either by lethal injection or in a gas chamber.

Coyotes also take over some of the cats' prey base of rats, mice, rabbits, other small mammals, and birds who have already been weakened by disease or by injury, such as intoxication by pesticides or a collision with a window or a vehicle--and let me take this opportunity right here and now to state that the notion of cats as a major predator of healthy birds and important factor in the disappearance of neotropical migratory songbirds is a pernicious lie, propagated by people and organizations who are unwilling to confront the realities of destruction of bird breeding habitat.

Perhaps the best-known study of cat predation, and the study most often cited out of context by people who want to blame cats for vanishing birds, was published by the British-based Mammal Society in February 1998. To produce that survey, 800 British cat owners recorded their cats' kills for six months--for roughly 144,000 cat-days of activity.

Among all those cats, the most active killer was Missy, with 125 kills in 180 days, including 28 birds. Almost all the rest were mice, voles, and other small rodents. The runner-up was Kipper, with 82 kills in 180 days, including six birds. That's 34 birds in 360 cat-days, by the most predatory cats (by far) among the entire sample base. Those most skilled of feline killers managed to kill birds at a rate amounting to just 16% of their total prey, and succeeded in killing a bird on only 9.4% of the days they hunted.

Even at that, cats are rarely the primary cause of the death of the birds they catch. Instead, they pick off the sick, the injured, and the elderly; sometimes the young of ground-nesting speices.

The importance of disease as a causal factor in "cat kills" of birds has only just begun to be recognized. A landmark in that regard was published in the June 3, 2000 edition of The Economist by researchers Anders Moller and Johannes Erritzoe of the Universite Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris. After examining the spleens of 500 birds who had been killed by cats, were killed in collisions with windows, or were hit by cars, they reported in that the spleens of the birds killed by cats were a third smaller on average, in 16 of 18 species, than in the birds killed in accidents.

In part this was because 70% of the cat-killed birds were juveniles; only half of the others were. But a more important factor, they suggested, was that "Birds succumbing to lots of infections, or inundated with energy-sapping parasites, have smaller spleens than healthy birds."

In short, the interactions of cats and birds are very, very complex, and deserve much more serious study, not least because the outdoor free-roaming cat population--contrary to what many bird-lovers believe--is now declining even faster than neotropical migratory songbirds are, and has been for approximately a decade. When free-roaming cat populations decline, coyotes take over some of their prey sources. Hawks and owls tend to take the rest. But hawks and owls breed relatively slowly, producing a maximum of two young per pair per year and usually fewer. If you simply kill cats, instead of making more prey available to avian predators, you create a habitat void which lures in more cats. If instead you sterilize cats, their numbers decline over time more-or-less in step with the reproductive capacity of hawks and owls to prevent a void, and then the replacement of cats as a non-native predator with native bird species can be successful.

Returning to the subject of rabies, the accomplishments of Latin American veterinarians and humane groups, and the possibilities for the future, most of you probably know that the World Health Organization pronounced Costa Rica free of canine rabies in 1980. This was a triumph with few precedents in the world at that time.

Unfortunately it was not followed up with a sustained vaccination program. Christine Crawford told me a few days ago that according to current Veterinary Licensing Board data, only 3% of the dogs in Costa Rica are now vaccinated against rabies.

This is very disappointing, and needs to be rectified. As Crawford pointed out, "A rabies outbreak would not only create a public health crisis, but would destroy the market for pets and veterinary care."

According to Miguel Escobar, M.D., associate director of Merial Inc., which is the world's largest manufacturer of anti-rabies vaccines, "In 1990 there were 16,464 reported cases of canine rabies in Latin America. In 1998 that was reduced to 2,608. Human rabies cases were reduced from 252 to 74."

Most of the rabies case reduction was in Buenos Aires, Lima, and Sao Paolo, all of which completely eliminated rabies by vaccinating from 60% to 80% of their estimated dog populations during a series of three-month campaigns which I believe were directed by Oscar Pedro Larghi, M.D., of Argentina.

The arrival of injectible sterilization drugs capable of permanently altering dogs and cats will very soon create the opportunity to combat dog and cat overpopulation in exactly the same manner. The anti-rabies vaccination campaign models developed in Latin America will be transferable to dog and cat sterilization--and moreover, the same injections should be able to carry the anti-rabies vaccine and the sterilization drugs. Therefore, when dealing with street dogs and feral cats, whose average life expectancy is about the same as the estimated three-year efficacy of modern anti-rabies vaccines, one injection may be sufficient to prevent most of the problems which might result from the animal running at large, without doing any harm to the health and well-being of the animal, and without losing the positive contribution of the animal to protecting public health by consuming refuse and rodents.

I believe Esther Mechler of Spay/USA will tell you more later about the progress that has been achieved recently toward developing injectible sterilants for dogs and cats and making them widely available. Much current technical information about these developments is available at the ANIMAL PEOPLE web site, <www.animalpeoplenews.org>, and will pop up if you go there and search on the terms "injectible sterilant" and "immunocontraceptive."

In addition, an organization called The Alliance for Contraception in Cats and Dogs is sponsoring an International Symposium on Non-Surgical Contraceptive Methods for Pet Population Control on April 19-21, 2002, in Atlanta. You can get the conference information from Henry Baker, Ph.D., at <bakerhj@vetmed.auburn.edu>.

The importance of the coming availability of injectible sterilization methods is not that it will ever completely replace surgical sterilization of dogs and cats who are kept as pets. Surgical sterilization may continue to be the preference of many petkeepers because of the advantages of surgical methods in altering undesirable animal behavior, such as urine spraying to mark territory, roaming, and becoming aggressive, as well as in preventing fecundity, and in preventing gonadal cancers that often develop in unaltered older pets.
Injectible sterilization is important primarily as a humane method of controlling and reducing populations of street dogs and feral cats, including the quasi-pets of the very poor, who may not actually live indoors with the people but whose presence is often welcome.

Surgery works as a dog and cat population control method, having hugely reduced unwanted animal births and animal control killing wherever it has been made affordable. But surgery still takes more veterinary time, training, and equipment than many communities have to offer.

Affluent societies can find the resources to control animal populations through surgery, with sufficient persuasion, but animal birth control elsewhere depends upon attracting outside help--which is not always available or dependable, whether in the more backward rural districts of the U.S. or in the underdeveloped nations of Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

Even if most of the people in poor communities accept the value of animal birth control, which survey data from both the U.S. and Asia indicates that they do, neither poor people nor their public institutions can easily find the money to invest in it.

Policy-makers might understand that sterilizing animals is cheaper and more effective in the long run than simply killing strays and ferals, but economic and political reality may preclude long-term thinking when 14 children have already been bitten by one mad dog, there isn't a dose of post-rabies exposure vaccine within hundreds of miles, and a mob is forming in the street to kill suspect animals and any humans who get in their way.

This occurred in May 2000 in Flores, Indonesia, and in June 1999 in Kabwe, Zambia. It is a daily reality in parts of India, where even though rabies vaccines are widely available, deployment is impeded by cost, lack of refrigeration, and corruption, which sometimes prevents poor people from obtaining the supposedly free vaccinations administered by government clinics. The vaccines are instead diverted to fee-charging private clinics, and poor people die in consequence.

The same problems may occur in parts of Latin America, even though we do not have the details.

Contraceptive injectiions will be much less expensive than surgery. They will present much less risk of infection at clinics obliged to operate without refrigeration, running water, or electricity. As mentioned, they can be given along with anti-rabies vaccination. Name any community anywhere in the underdeveloped world, and the cost of giving injections to sterilize and vaccinate all of the dogs and cats now running at large will almost certainly be less than the cost of improving and expanding their animal care and control shelters and nonprofit surgical sterilization clinics to meet U.S. and European standards--which, in my opinion, are themselves seriously deficient.

Upgrading animal care facilities in the underdeveloped world needs to be done too, and in a few minutes I will share some ideas about how to do that while avoiding the horrible mistakes that have been made throughout the U.S. and Canada.

However, reducing the numbers of free-roaming dogs and cats and eliminating rabies outbreaks must come first. Otherwise, the animal shelters and nonprofit clinics will never catch up to the ever-expanding need for their services.

Sterilizing enough feral dogs and cats to visibly and permanently reduce the numbers at large is inherently difficult using surgery because sterilization--by any method --does not begin to bring a population decline until approximately 70% of the breeding population are fixed.

Up to that point, reducing the number of litters born tends to enhance the survival rate of the rest. Pregnant and nursing mothers have less competition, so find more prey and take fewer chances in hunting. Better-nourished puppies and kittens are less vulnerable to disease and--because they are nursed longer and leave their mothers later--are less vulnerable to predation.

Until 70% of a population of street dogs and/or feral cats are altered, sterilizing some but not all can actually bring a reproductive surge, to the frequent dismay of individual rescuers and small humane societies who think they can make a difference by fixing one or two at a time as funds allow.

Failure to anticipate population surges caused by eliminating causes of feral dog and cat mortality can completely undo neuter/vaccinate/return projects, especially if humane organizations have promised more immediate population reduction than can be delivered. We have seen this happen over and over, around the world, when surgical sterilization projects fail to reach 70% of the dog or cat population in the target area before the arrival of the next breeding season, and a dog or cat population surge results instead of a reduction.

The advent of contraceptive vaccination, especially via bait-ball delivery, should eliminate the surge effect by enabling rescuers to reach the 70% target relatively quickly and inexpensively.

Coincidentally, 70% is also the level of vaccination coverage required to eliminate rabies within an animal population. At 70% vaccination, the virus tends to die with infected animals rather than spreading rapidly enough to new hosts to survive.

Combining species-specific vaccinations to achieve both immunocontraceptive sterilization and rabies protection with a single baited dose is accordingly a Holy Grail for some researchers--which appears to be within reach. Baited doses can be administered without even having to capture the target animal, and if the immunocontraceptive vaccine and anti-rabies vaccine are genetically engineered to affect only the target species, any risk resulting from the wrong kind of animal consuming the bait can be avoided.

As distributing species-specific immunocontraceptive and anti-rabies vaccine baits would be as simple as distributing poison, any animal control department could do it, under proper veterinary supervision.

Incidentally, while immunocontraceptives for dogs and cats are still in the regulatory approval process in the U.S. and some other nations, species-specific oral rabies vaccination has already existed for approximately 25 years. Beginning in 1976, it was deployed with spectacular success to eliminating canine rabies from western Europe, by eradicating the reservoirs of rabies within wild foxes. Since 1991 it has also been used to halt rabies outbreaks among foxes, coyotes, and raccoons in parts of the U.S. and Canada. Oral vaccination has the potential to eradicate rabies altogether, which not only kills as many as 40,000 humans per year in Asia and Africa, but is also responsible for the prejudice against dogs prevailing in much of the world, leading to brutal episodic purges of street dogs, and stimulating some human consumption of dogs, whose meat is wrongly believed in some parts of Asia to confer immunity to rabies.

The introduction of oral rabies vaccination to the U.S. was unfortunately delayed for at least six years by legal actions brought by the National Wildlife Federation and Foundation for Economic Trends. Each professed concern that oral rabies vaccines are genetically engineered. But the National Wildlife Federation is the national umbrella for 48 state hunting clubs, and may actually have been more concerned that vaccinating wildlife against rabies would eliminate a common pretext for recreational hunting and trapping.

Immunosterilization of wildlife even more directly threatens hunting and trapping, because this technique could be used to prevent wild animal populations from producing what wildlife managers term a "huntable surplus," who may become a public nuisance if they are not killed. For this reason, pro-hunting organizations won passage of a law against wildlife contraception in the state of Illinois, and have fought wildlife contraception programs in many other states.

Similar opposition to immunocontraceptive methods may be expected in Latin America. We can expect a powerful coalition of conservative elements to unite against immunosterilization of street dogs and feral cats, including hunters, opponents of genetic engineering, antivivisectionists opposed to the animal experimentation done to develop immunosterilants, religious leaders concerned about the possible use of injectible sterilants on people, and conservation biologists who fear that vaccines deployed to sterilize dogs and cats might also inhibit the reproduction of endangered wild canine and feline species.

The humane, veterinary, and public health communities could combine to sway the debate in favor of immunosterilization, to the enormous longterm benefit of all concerned despite the anxieties of the conservative elements. Forming such an alliance, however, will require a radical break from the doctrinaire positions against animal research and biotechnology favored by the anti-vivisection wing of the animal rights movement.

Animal advocates who endorse the use of immunocontraception to save millions of animal lives will have to accept that it is a technique made accessible through genetic engineering and that some animal experimentation is inevitable to win regulatory approval for using it. This does not mean that anyone has to approve of "all" animal research or "all" genetic engineering. It does require, however, that the ends and the means must be weighed against each other in a moral cost/benefit analysis, and that absolutist positions must yield to compromise if immunocontraception is to become available.

For the humane community, this is a significant dilemma to be confronted.
It surfaced at the Spay/USA conference in July 2000, where Esther Mechler brought together several of the leading immunosterilant researchers to describe their progress to the humane community.

One of those researchers was Julie Levy, DVM, of Gainesville, Florida, who also happens to be the founder of Project Catnip, one of the most successful nonprofit surgical sterilization projects in the U.S. working to reduce the population of feral cats.

Dr. Levy explained that she had not previously told the humane community about her immunosterilant research because she expected a hostile reception. Dr. Levy explained her reluctant acceptance that developing and winning regulatory approval of immunosterilants requires the ethically difficult sacrifices of the lives of some animals in testing--which may prevent the births and population control killings of millions. She asked the audience to appreciate her decision to put preventing suffering ahead of maintaining personal purity. Many humane workers in the audience might have recognized in Julie's position a mirror of the rationale that animal shelter workers use for killing healthy animals at conventional American animal control agencies and humane societies because there are not enough homes to adopt them.

Shelter workers, however, have for too long killed animals with little hope of accomplishing more by it than emptying cages so that more can be captured and held for killing. Immunosterilization promises to end that cycle.

You veterinarians in the audience have been waiting patiently for quite a long time now for me to get to the part about how assisting government animal control departments and nonprofit agencies to sterilize and vaccinate street dogs and feral cats and pets of the poor can end up making you rich.

Hard data from the U.S., Europe, and Japan all demonstrates that reducing the abundance of dogs and cats translates into substantially increasing veterinary incomes--because the amount of veterinary care invested in each animal rapidly rises when animals are scarcer, harder to replace, more accepted within homes, more emotionally bonded with families, and live for much longer. The discount or subsidy invested in sterilizing and vaccinating an owned dog or cat comes back many times over in the fees veterinary care rendered after the animal reaches nine to ten years of age.

This is somewhat recognized in the veterinary community--but how does the investment in sterilizing street dogs and feral cats come back in veterinary profits?

Apart from the public health benefits and ecological benefits of sterilizing and vaccinating street dogs and feral cats, for which public institutions should be providing reasonable fees, there is the advantage to veterinarians of taking control of the supply side of supply-and-demand economics. So long as street dogs and feral cats are abundant, lost or deceased dogs and cats are easily replaced. Investment in their care is correspondingly less. They are disposed of more casually. Because the animals come and go more rapidly, relatively few people develop the intensity of emotional bonding with their dogs and cats that leads them to spend money on the veterinary care necessary to enable them to live into their geriatric years.

In the U.S., Europe, and Japan, more than half of the lifetime investment in veterinary care of a pet occurs during the last two years of the life of the animal--if the animal lives to be at least 10 years old.

I do not have recent statistics on pet acquisition in Europe and Japan, but in the U.S., about 20% of all owned dogs and a third of all owned cats come out of shelters and the feral cat population. Reducing the street dog and feral population reduces the easy replacability factor--and further, each street dog and feral cat whom you sterilize and vaccinate has a much better chance of becoming an adoptable pet. Thus you benefit, as a veterinarian, in two ways: you reduce the supply of easily acquired and easily disposed of animals who will never become part of your customer base, and you potentially acquire a customer at the same time.

Let me quote to you some of the data demonstrating that low-cost and free neutering programs do not harm veterinary incomes in any way, since most of the animals whom they serve would otherwise never see a veterinarian at all, and that the net effect, over several years, is beneficial to the entire veterinary community.

American Veterinary Medical Association statistics, published in the AVMA U.S. Pet Ownership and Demographic Sourcebook, show that since 1987, coinciding with the rapid expansion of low-cost neutering and vaccination programs nationwide and, incidentally, the formation of Spay/USA, the percentage of U.S. dog owners who seek regular vet care is up 13%, to more than 85% overall, and the percentage of U.S. cat owners who seek regular veterinary care is up 17%, to nearly 70% overall.

The total number of pet-keeping households increased by more than 10 million over the same time, while veterinary expenditure per pet-owning household more than tripled, keeping well ahead of inflation, which amounts to more than doubling when inflation is taken into account.

No veterinary jobs were lost. The number of working veterinarians in the U.S. has increased from 45,000 in 1990, of whom barely 20,000 mainly treated dogs and cats, to more than 64,000 today, including about 32,000 who mainly treat dogs and cats. There is enormous demand in the U.S. for even more vets. Approximately 2,000 newly trained vets begin practice each year, according to USDA figures, while older vets, like Dr. Gissendammer here, are tending to delay retirement--because business is booming, and scarcity is now driving both veterinary and vet tech incomes up, fast.

U.S. veterinary incomes currently range, by AVMA-determined median, from $59,000 per year for all-animal general practitioners up to $76,000 per year for veterinarians at university research facilities. Shelter vets fall among the middle range.

The entire U.S. veterinary salary range has increased by 40% since 1991--but the fastest rise of all has been among shelter veterinarians who are capable of performing 40 dog or cat sterilization surgeries per day. In 1991 a veterinarian of that speciality and skill level could expect to earn about $45,000 a year. Today, a salary of $90,000 a year would be at the low end of the scale. At one point within the past 18 months, the San Francisco SPCA, Massachusetts SPCA, and North Shore Animal League America all had unfilled veterinary positions at salaries of $105,000 a year and up. Those are three of the biggest, richest, most prestigious humane organizations in the world, in three very fashionable locations--and the veterinary help they needed simply was not available at any price. Shelter vet techs earned under $18,000 a year, on average, as recently as 1997, according to Society of Animal Welfare Administrators salary surveys--but vet techs in private practice now start at $20,000 and up. Experienced vet techs make $26,000-$35,000. Shelters are having to raise their pay scales accordingly.

The Michigan Humane Society had to close two sterilization clinics in mid-1999 because four vets were hired away at bigger salaries, leaving just 11 vets to fill 15 jobs. The Humane Society of Macomb County, also in Michigan, had just two vets to fill six positions, and in nearby Grand Rapids, Michigan, the Ottawa Shores Humane Society could not reserve enough open time at local private practice veterinary hospitals to sterilize all of the animals it was able to adopt.

The U.S. vet shortage is causing a ripple effect worldwide. Veterinarians are emigrating to the U.S. faster than foreign veterinary schools can train replacements, especially in specialty subjects.

"If we had a bovine encephalopathy crisis in Australia, we would most likely have to import veterinary pathologists," Australian Veterinary Medical Association president Geoff Niethe warned in 1998.

But the most extreme example of the global effect of U.S. veterinary demand occurs in India, Veterinarians of Indian origin are abundant in the U.S., and include the entire veterinary staff of the Pennsylvania SPCA. Yet the ratio of veterinarians to domesticated animals in India is believed to be the lowest in the world. Specialists practically don't exist--because they all emigrate, to make more money in a year in the U.S. than they could in 10 years back home.

The Indian veterinary shortage has emerged as the biggest obstacle to reaching the national goal of ending population control dog-killing by 2005--and to maintaining the no-kill policies which already exist in Mumbai, Chenai, Visakhapatnam, and other cities which have already introduced such policies, contingent upon humane societies sterilizing and vaccinating enough street dogs to prevent rabies outbreaks.

India is a uniquely animal-loving nation. Reverence for animal life is central to Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism, which all originated in India, and basic animal rights are enshrined within the Indian constitution. The culture minister of India, Maneka Gandhi, includes within her portfolio the duty to promote animal welfare.

India is also a much wealthier nation than much of the world realizes. The wealthiest third of the population of India have purchasing power equal to or greater than that of the average American during the 1950s. But just as Americans during the 1950s did not spend much money on veterinary care because dogs and cats were overabundant and easily replaced, Indians do not spend money on veterinary care, either. As there is no scarcity of dogs and cats, they receive no economic priority.

Costa Rica is at the opposite end of the spectrum, in terms of the availability of veterinary services, but not in terms of veterinary demand. Costa Rica actually has one of the highest ratios of veterinarians to human population in the world--higher than that of the U.S.

If Costa Rica also had U.S.-level veterinary demand, every veterinarian in Costa Rica could make a very good living. But U.S.-level veterinary demand will not develop in Costa Rica until enough dogs and cats are sterilized to make keeping a pet healthy a matter of economic priority.

Most of Latin America, including Costa Rica, still lacks humane infrastructure. There are not enough nonprofit animal protection organizations, not enough nonprofit sterilization and vaccination clinics, not enough humane education programs, not enough animal advocacy to raise community standards and strengthen anti-cruelty legislation, and not enough animal shelters, either, to facilitate adoptions of pets, return lost pets to homes, and provide emergency foster care to help keep a pet from becoming homeless when the petkeeper is temporarily incapacitated by disaster, illness or accident.

There is a crying need in Latin America to develop the right kind of humane infrastructure--which can be done relatively quickly, with the veterinary community helping to provide the leadership, if the big mistakes of the U.S. and Europe can be avoided.

Dr. Vicente long since recognized mistake #1: shelters are not the answer to dog and cat overpopulation and basic animal care and control needs. Trying to address those problems by creating a shelter network is using the wrong tool for the job.

Two years ago we visited the Sacred Valley of the Incas in Peru, where we discovered virtually no humane infrastructure--no animal shelters, rescue groups, animal rights groups, nor even veterinary clinics and animal control departments. Since there were no existing animal care programs to visit, I spent a lot of my time contemplating the opportunities to start a program there, tailored to the specific needs and possibilities of the region. Although Peru is very different from Costa Rica in many ways, some of the underlying principles may be applicable here, and anywhere, the first of which is that humane institutions must build what will best serve the animals and the people of the community, not mere imitations of what someone has done somewhere else.

The dog situation in Peru, overall, is probably about the same as here, or anywhere in the underdeveloped world. Street dogs mingle with free-roaming pet dogs. Some dogs have been vaccinated against rabies but almost none have been sterilized. Public attitudes toward animals are generally positive, including toward dogs, but few people know very much about proper dog care and training.

Local poverty inhibits but should not obstruct starting a humane organization to serve the Sacred Valley of the Incas. The Peruvian economy is rapidly developing, and on the whole the standard of living appears to be relatively high compared to many other places we have visited. The nation is impressively clean, with a strong work ethic. Facilities of every kind are repaired and maintained, and providing good public service seems to be a matter of pride, not just something done for tips. Personal honesty also seems highly valued. In short, the moral atmosphere should be accepting of humane values if they are introduced from within the community, by respected local people, as part of the societal moral ethic.

Ideally, a local person or group could be found who is already trying to help the street dogs and feral cats of the Sacred Valley, and that person or group could be taught the methods and be granted the seed money to take full advantage of the opportunities I saw, which might be more obvious to an outsider than to a person who has little previous experience with fundraising and organizing humane projects.

If such a person or group is not evident, however, this is not necessarily any more of an obstacle to getting started than lack of a local representative is to any business trying to expand into a new market. What must be done in that case is seeking out people of appropriate interest and some relevant skills, to train under a mentor in temporary residence, until those people are ready to work on their own.

All around the world there are people who would like to do something to help animals, if they only knew how. The first task of a humane evangelist or entrepreneur is to find those people, share with them the idea that something can be done, and then help them to get it started--after which, it is time for the instigator to step back out of the way and just be accessible when and if additional help is needed.

The Sacred Valley extends from Cuzco, the ancient capital of the Incas, population 450,000, to Machu Picchu, the leading tourist draw in Latin America, attracting 250,000-plus visitors per year. About half of these visitors come from Latin America. The U.S., England, and Germany are the major sources of the rest.

Viritually all of the visitors pass through the small Cuzco airport and the Machu Picchu railway station (as well as the Cuzco railway station, but the pace of movement through there tends to be much more hurried.)

Kiosks at the Cuzco airport and Machu Picchu railway station should be able to quite effectively solicit on-the-spot financial contributions on behalf of the local dogs and cats from tourists, distribute fundraising literature printed in English, Spanish, and German, and collect names and addresses for further solicitation through regular mailings. Locally made souvenir items pertaining to dogs and cats could also be sold.

Based on the results from similar projects in other locations, I would estimate the first-year fundraising potential at $125,000-plus, or about one dollar from each American or European visitor. This would be enough to hire a fulltime professional staff of six and carry out substantial programs, given the low Peruvian wage structure, as well as to do further fundraising.

I should think the fundraising potential of such an organization after several years could reach into the millions of dollars.

The program should consist of a fixed-site, locally staffed no-kill animal hospital and adoption shelter in Cuzco, providing free sterilization and basic veterinary care to any owned or rescued dog or cat, plus a mobile clinic, also staffed by local people, which would traverse the Sacred Valley each week, with stops at the Pisac marketplace, the major center of commerce between Cuzco and Machu Picchu; Urubamba, the major tourist stopover for meals and accommodation; Ollantaytambo, the biggest tourist attraction between Cuzco and Machu Picchu; and Aguas Calientes, the community serving as departure point for the bus to Machu Picchu itself.

The mobile clinic would provide free or low-cost veterinary care for any type of animal, if the care is for the benefit of the animal, along with humane education--and it should try to work in cooperation with any resident veterinarians discovered to be in the area. The idea would be to increase the volume and level of veterinary care provided in the region, not to compete with existing practices.

I would anticipate the need for one fulltime veterinarian; two veterinary assistants (one to manage the Cuzco clinic and one to travel with the mobile clinic); a business manager, and a pair of fundraisers, one to handle the kioski in Cuzco and the other to handle the kiosk at Machu Picchu.

I would not suggest starting with short staff, as a successful project should start with the wherewithal to do things on a visibly effective scale right from the beginning.

The major role for outside nongovernmental organizations would be providing start-up capitalization, organizational assistance, and oversight to the extent necessary to get the work started, either by underwriting the expansion of an existing project or by hiring the personnel needed to start from scratch.

The necessary non-veterinary personnel could be recruited from within the tourism industry. We happened to notice a young female railway conductor feeding a stray dog. She seemed to be personable, fluently multilingual, and concerned. She may never have heard of humane societies, or humane work as an occupation, and perhaps never even heard of pet sterilization, but a person who feeds a stray animal is a person who cares about animals, who might become enormously inspired if introduced to the idea that she could do much more.

Accordingly, if I happened to be personally trying to start this project, I would try to hire that conductor and other people I saw demonstrating kindness toward the dogs--and I would enhance the prestige of their work by paying them more than whatever wage they might be earning at present.

At Machu Pichu, the flow-through from other parts of South America practically guarantees that any successful program would soon be emulated. The same might be said of dozens of other strategic starting points.

A fellow reporter from a major metropolitan newspaper in a region with a notoriously high rate of killing in the local shelters recently badgered me for an hour trying to get an estimate of how far behind his region might be in terms of getting to a rate as low as that of San Francisco.

San Francisco, as mentioned early in this talk, finished 2000 with a dog-and-cat-killing rate of just 2.6 per 1,000 human residents--by far the lowest rate ever achieved in any big U.S. city. Many cities are still killing dogs and cats at 20 to 30 times that rate. The region I was asked about doesn't just have a high killing rate. It is also seriously deficient in providing all other basic humane services. The humane societies attempting to serve the area are more than an hour's drive away from each other. Many communities don't even have a dog pound, let alone a full-service humane society, a low-cost neutering clinic, a high-volume adoption center to help rehome animals, or care-for-life facilities for animals who cannot be rehomed.

Elsewhere around North America, most regions had a reasonably complete network of animal control shelters by 1960, had full-service humane societies by 1980, and began adding low-cost neutering clinics, high-volume adoption centers, and care-for-life sanctuaries by 1990, at latest.

I explained the history to my colleague, and then he pressed me again:

"Well, are we 40 years behind? Twenty? Ten? What is it?"

But history alone does not answer his question. Consider a tortoise-and-hare race in which the hare not only starts out at a much faster pace, but also gallops in the wrong direction. By the time he circles back to the right route, it may not matter whether he is tired or not: the tortoise might already have finished.

That reporter's community may be starting well behind other communities, yet it is not necessarily behind at all--because so many of the older humane agencies have galloped off the wrong way. Because animal control shelters were killing animals by inhumane means, such as shooting or gassing or decompression, or were selling animals to laboratories to help meet their operating costs, humane socities all over North America decades ago bid on the animal control contracts; took them over, often at a net loss; found themselves having to kill animals in high volume too, from lack of adoptive homes and lack of the imagination to do something else about the problem; and tended to keep quiet about the killing, as the donating public tends to respond badly to finding out that humane societies were killing.

But of course the secret of humane societies doing high-volume killing did get out eventually, and donations did suffer. Then, because humane societies were putting all their resources into catching and killing animals, under disadvantageous animal control contracts, they were not putting resources into saving animals' lives and preventing unwanted pet births--which were the programs that the public wanted. And so, as I explained earlier, the problem of dog and cat overpopulation just got worse, and worse, and worse.

How far behind any location may be is accordingly not a matter of when it acquired an animal control agency, or a humane society. Rather, it is a matter of when the people running animal control, or the humane society, or who just plain cared about animals, finally realized that if you really want to solve the homeless dog and cat problem, eliminate strays, and eliminate all the problems that go with them, you need to start by providing low-cost or free sterilization and vaccination.

These are the necessities. Later you can add a high-volume adoption center, and a care-for-life sanctuary. If your sterilization and vaccination clinic, your high-volume adoption center, and your care-for-life sanctuary all do their work well, especially the sterilization clinic, you will never need conventional animal control shelters and so-called full-service humane societies that kill most of the animals they purport to "rescue."

You need the low-cost neutering and vaccination clinic first, or an equivalent service contracted out to private practice veterinarians, because whether or not pet owners are able to afford neutering and vaccination, or are responsible enough to do it, it still needs to be done, for the benefit of the entire community, including the animals.

There is often great resistance, especially among private practice veterinarians, to the idea of "rewarding" so-called "irresponsible" petkeepers by sterilizing and vaccinating their animals for them. It is often said that these people should not have pets. These arguments are irrelevant to reality. The fact is, people in need of help to get their pets sterilized do have dogs and cats, and those animals do need sterilization and vaccination. Ignoring that need is like ignoring that your neighbor's house is on fire because you happen to know that he smokes in bed. Whether or not your neighbor is a fool, the fire must be put out to reduce possible harm to your own house.

After you have a successful sterilization and vaccination program, you need a high-volume pet adoption center, if you can start one, because in order to find homes for adoptable dogs and cats, you need to have them in a convenient location, where it is easy for them to attract people's attention, where the animals can be happy and healthy and comfortable, and can get whatever training they may need to succeed in a home while they await adoption.

None of that can be done effectively in dreary rows of steel-and-cement cages out beside the town dump. Going in the right direction means treating these animals as if they have at least as much value as inanimate merchandise. Treat them as if they have value, and people will want them--and the way you treat animals, as veterinarians and humane representatives, will be perceived as the appropriate standard of pet care.

Let me briefly point out here that dogs do not go kennel-crazy from being in a shelter too long. Rather, they go kennel-crazy because conventional animal shelter design couldn't be better designed if they were put together by mad scientists whose sole object was to drive dogs insane. The standard cement-floored, cement-and-chain-link walled, tin-roofed dog run is an atrocity, which mindlessly evolved from the layout of horse stalls in the Middle Ages. Humane societies copied the manner in which hunting packs were kept, in spare horse stalls, without giving the slightest thought to the behavioral differences between dogs and horses. Dogs need compatible companions, they need room to run, they need security from being stared at from a close distance by strange dogs, they need outdoor air and light, and they need to be able to dig.

Give a dog what a dog needs, and it is very easy to keep dogs happy and healthy. Deprive a dog of any of these things, and you will soon have sick and despairing dogs. Teach a community to deprive a dog of these things, and you will have a community full of maladjusted dogs being surrendered to shelters or dumped on the street.

Cats need to be able to climb--and they prefer a quiet environment. There is no animal easier to care for than a cat. Even great apes in zoos often keep pet cats successfully--and so has at least one now deceased grizzly bear. Unfortunately, great apes and the occasional bear in zoos often have a better sense of what a cat needs than humane society shelter directors. Too often I visit humane societies full of nervous, panic-stricken, and diseased cats, who are kept in cells the size of a microwave oven, where they have to listen to 100 kennel-crazed dogs barking all night and all day. That is not a humane way to keep a cat; it is a kitty torture chamber, and if the ancient Egyptians were right that human beings will face a cat on Judgement Day, many a shelter director may be passing a very hot eternity.

If you keep dogs and cats in a facility that looks like a jail and smells like a cesspool, dogs and cats all over town will be treated like prisoners on a chain-gang, because the condition of your facility sends the message that you think this is okay.

If you treat dogs and cats as if they are honored guests, the community standards will rise to your standard. This too has been proved time and again.

Finally, you need care-for-life sanctuaries as a backup, for the animals who cannot be adopted out, because many people will not bring a dog or cat to a shelter if they think the animal might be killed. Instead, they will abandon the animal somewhere "to give him a chance," or "give her a chance." That animal may then contribute to the breeding population of street dogs and feral cats.

People give up pets for all sorts of reasons. Whether or not we think the reasons are "valid," giving up pets is a fact of life which must be accommodated. It must be understood that many of these pets are given up not because they are not loved, but because desperate people feel they have no choice: they have lost their job, lost a home, an animal has bitten or scratched a child, the spouse hates the animal, the landlord is threatening to evict them, or someone has died and the pet-keeper is so depressed he or she just can't cope.

If these people feel the pet is going to either find a home or be well looked after at a sanctuary, they will bring the animal into the adoption-and-care network. The animal will not end up having "accidental" litters out on the streets, further contributing to the homeless animal problem.

Animal control agencies that can respond immediately to nuisance animal complaints and act as a dog-and-cat lost-and-found are very nice to have--but they are not what it takes to end pet overpopulation and shelter killing.

Full-service humane societies that can provide emergency veterinary care, do humane education, do animal rescue, and investigate cruelty complaints are also nice to have.
Yet they are not what it takes to end pet overpopulation and shelter killing either.
A community placing the first emphasis on developing animal control agencies and full-service humane societies, in short, is going in the wrong direction.

So, how far behind is Latin America in humanely responding to dog and cat overpopulation?
It all depends on which way you go from here. Go the right way, and you can soon be leading the world.

--Merritt Clifton, editor, ANIMAL PEOPLE.

Merritt Clifton
Editor, ANIMAL PEOPLE
P.O. Box 960
Clinton, WA 98236
Telephone: 360-579-2505
Fax: 360-579-2575
E-mail: anmlpepl@whidbey.com
Web: www.animalpeoplenews.org

[ANIMAL PEOPLE is the leading independent newspaper providing original investigative coverage of animal protection worldwide, founded in 1992. Our readership of 30,000-plus includes the decision-makers at more than 9,000 animal protection organizations. We have no alignment or affiliation with any other entity.]