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Homeless dog overpopulation and effective solutions

The fact that only 1 out of 10 dog finds a permanent home, gives us an idea about the cruel but real society we live in and how poorly we face it.  In this article we will explain what happens to the other 9 dogs and when and how we got to this point. There are around 900 million dogs in the world. 300 million are lucky enough to inhabit a responsible home, but the other 600 million are sadly free-ranging dogs.

We will begin by explaining the 2 main factors that play a crucial part in homeless dogs.  The first and most important is the fast and uncontrolled reproduction this animals have and the second one, dogs being thrown away because their owners don’t either want them or, can’t have them. In both of these cases there are more dogs than homes willing to take care of them. In the following map we show the top ten countries with most dog population in the world. [pic 1]

Although there are many shelters willing to help and decrease the outrageous numbers shown in the previous map, the numbers of dogs is way higher than the numbers of shelters, and unfortunately the number of dogs that can be supported in this shelters, are limited by various reasons, lack of food, lack of space, not enough medicine, etc. Around every 13 seconds a dog is put down because of the small space and lacking recourses to maintain all of them. Only in the United States, which had the higher amount of homeless dogs, puts down 1.2 billion dogs using euthanasia. Only 35% of shelter dogs are adopted and around 3.5 million dogs enter every year. Also many dogs get lost from their homes and according to the National Council on Pet Population Study and Policy (NCPPSP only 15 to 20% of dogs are returned to their owners.

In the following chart we show dogs strong capacity of reproduction because of the large amount of unneutered dogs.

 [pic 2]

One of the best solutions to solve this and to avoid more homeless dogs would be to spay o neuter most of them. If the dog if incapable of reproducing the number of dogs will decrease significantly and although it can take longer than other solutions, it would be a long-term solution and would guarantee a difference. By neutering only 1 dog we would slow down the whole system and by this, we would be saving millions of possibly miserable dog lives.

In conclusion this big problem has increased over the years because of the lack of commitment people has. We encourage people to help in anyway possible to somehow decrease this homeless dogs and to save lives. If we all got together and gave it the importance it deserves, in less than 20 years we could decrease the homeless population in more than 40%. There’s definitely a chance to change this and make the world for dogs a better one.  

[pic 3]

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