[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
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