PMC wants to conduct pilot project on sucess / failure of ABC

[Guest guest]

>They have threfore decided to conduct a trial to research on the

>effectiveness of ABC programme. They have approached us to do the needful.

 

 

Doing an accurate dog count is quite easy, & counting

sterilized vs. unsterilized dogs is also quite easy, if the

sterilized dogs have been identified in a readily visible manner,

such as ear-tagging or ear-notching.

 

As I previously posted to AAPN on August 8, 2007:

 

 

The dog population or any city, or population of monkeys,

pigs, cattle, or lazy bureaucrats, is best estimated by doing line

transects, and is done most rapidly if one can mobilize many

volunteers.

 

This does not require a lot of training, just careful

observation and accurately recording basic numbers on a clipboard:

males, females, puppies, ear-notched for sterilized or not.

 

A student group or school class could do the necessary line

transects as a math or science project.

 

The methodology is for people to walk completely across the

city from outskirt to outskirt, by several different routes,

counting dogs (or whatever) & then multiplying the number of dogs

seen by the total area of the city.

 

I recently did line transects of a suburb of Ahmedabad,

India, that were found to have 90% accuracy when the Animal Help

Foundation followed up my work with a much longer and more intensive

door-to-door count. (Where I counted 67 dogs in two hours, a

two-day effort led by Rahul Seghal found 74.)

 

Line transects can also be done from a car, but the car

would have to move very slowly, with multiple observers, in order

to see every dog. Walking produces far more accurate information.

 

If you do a line transect well, your count will detect most

of the dogs on the side streets as well as the main streets, and you

may also detect some dogs who are behind doors or walls, when they

bark as you pass.

 

Counting feral cats is somewhat more difficult, because of

the furtive habits of feral cats. In order to do a good cat count,

it is necessary to walk at dawn or dusk, and may be necessary to

climb to the highest rooftop on each block to see how many cats may

be seen on other rooftops.

 

Fortunately, it is not necessary to see cats in order to

count them. Scat counts can also be highly reliable, figuring about

one cat per identifiable scat (because scats don't last long in

outdoor environments, and the number one will not find will

approximately equal to the number of duplicates one will find that

were produced by a single bold cat.)

 

--

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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