Street dogs vs. cars

[Guest guest]

One of the questions I am most often asked lately is how

automobile traffic contributes to reducing dog populations, and how

do we know that this is a factor? The following are the basics.

 

 

Motor vehicle traffic reduces street dog populations in four

ways: by direct killing; by isolating dogs from each other,

inhibiting reproduction; by reducing urban grain storage for work

animals, thereby reducing the numbers of rats accessible to dogs;

and by removing animal droppings from the streets, an important

" filler " food for street dogs.

 

True street dogs who never lived in homes disappeared from

the U.S. between 1946 and 1965. John Marbanks found 10 million dogs

meeting that description in studies done between 1947 and 1950.

There were only 600,000 street dogs in the already heavily motorized

Northeast, but were 3.5 million in the South and 2.3 million in the

Midwest.

 

After Marbanks' work, no big studies of the U.S. dog

population were done for more than 20 years.

 

By the time studies resumed in the early 1970s, in

connection with the introduction of low-cost dog sterilization

programs, free-roaming never-owned dogs did not even appear as a

statistical category. Sometimes they were mentioned, but only as an

occasional oddity, mostly in Southern communities.

 

The relevant data--

 

YEAR CARS, U.S. MILES DRIVEN ALL DOGS STREET DOGS

 

1946 28 million 284,650 32 million 10 million

 

1965 75.26 million 713,984 43 million (nil)

 

 

Interestingly enough, the owned dog population appears to

have grown by about the same number as the unowned & free-roaming dog

population decreased.

 

This suggests a reallocation of " carrying capacity, " from

dogs living directly off of refuse, on their own, to dogs living on

refuse processed into pet food, in homes.

 

These same years also coincided with a massive reorganization

of the U.S. butchering and slaughtering industries, from many

thousands of small local facilities to just a few hundred large

centralized slaughterhouses, which much closer containment and

reprocessing of meat wastes.

 

This trend has continued ever since, with far fewer but much

larger slaughterhouses, and ever more containment of wastes.

 

Shelter killing increased exponentially during the same years

that the U.S. street dog population vanished, as the number of U.S.

animal shelters rose from under 300 before World War II to about

2,500 by 1970.

 

However, most of the killing was of owner-surrendered

puppies & kittens, up to two-thirds of the killed animals were cats,

and most of the increase in the numbers of shelters occurred in the

heavily populated parts of the U.S., not the rural South and Midwest.

 

All shelter studies done post-1970 have found that the

overwhelming majority of stray dogs handled by animal shelters

appeared to have been at large for no more than a few days.

 

The best available estimates of total U.S. shelter intake of

dogs appear to be about 2.5 million circa 1950 (equal to about 25% of

the estimated street dog population); 6.5 million circa 1970, by

which time there were no street dogs to speak of left; up to 8.9

million in 1985, as the national dog sterilization rate approached

two-thirds; back down to about 4.5 million today.

 

 

 

--

Merritt Clifton

Editor, ANIMAL PEOPLE

P.O. Box 960

Clinton, WA 98236

 

Telephone: 360-579-2505

Fax: 360-579-2575

E-mail: anmlpepl

Web: www.animalpeoplenews.org

 

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