| The secret lives of
feral dogs |
| A Pennsylvania city instructs police to
shoot strays, opening a sad window on animal care in the age of
austerity |
| By Will Doig (from
Salon) |
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Want to get people riled up? Institute a new
policy about shooting puppies.
The city of Harrisburg, Pa., learned this last week when an
internal police department memo went public, instructing
officers of the cash-strapped city to stop bringing its growing
number of stray dogs to the shelter. Instead, it said, they
should release them in another area, adopt them themselves — or
just put a bullet in them. Now that’s the new austerity.
Amid the predictable outcry, the city promised it would
reconsider the policy. But the controversy also illuminated a
serious — and largely ignored — urban issue: the soaring number
of feral cats and dogs, and cities’ decreasing ability to deal
with them. “The problem is way worse than people assume,” says
Randy Grim, founder of Stray Rescue of St. Louis. “It’s a topic
nobody talks about, but over the past 20 years it’s become an
underground epidemic in most cities.”
There are lots of reasons for this — reduced animal control, the
resurgence of dogfighting – but at base, the feral explosion has
coincided with our ever-rising demand for furry little friends.
America is turning into a nation of pet hoarders. In 1970 we had
30 million pet cats; today we have 90 million. Dog ownership has
tripled since the 1960s. And the more we take in, the more we
drop back on the street, where they procreate at a speed that
would make Rick Santorum beam. The exact number of feral dogs
and cats is unknown, but there are certainly well over 100
million at this point.
The epidemic has gone largely unnoticed because urban feral dogs
and cats have extraordinary skills at remaining invisible. Grim,
a fixture in St. Louis who’s been working with feral dogs there
for decades, says the dogs emerge from alleys and abandoned
buildings to look for food in early dawn or bad weather. “They
understand how to survive. Most of them spend only 10 percent of
their time being visible to people.”
Same goes for cats, says Jeff Horn, who completed a
groundbreaking study of feral cat behaviors last year. Horn
fitted 42 cats with radio tracking collars in the neighboring
Illinois cities of Champaign and Urbana. “Some of the male cats
are really only active for a small portion of the night,” he
says. Females, on the other hand, are so often either pregnant
or nursing that “they were active up to 20 hours a day just to
find food to survive and feed their young.” And Horn was
surprised by how large a range the cats staked out. Together,
they prowled a region of some 6,286 acres, and a single cat
roamed over 1,351 acres, an area greater than one-and-a-half
Central Parks.
That territory included everything from forest to concrete
jungle — feral dogs and cats are remarkably adaptive to
different environments. Moscow’s feral dogs even use the subway
to expand their territories. “They orient themselves in a number
of ways,” Russian animal behaviorist Andrei Neuronov told the
Financial Times. “They figure out where they are by smell, by
recognizing the name of the station from the recorded
announcer’s voice, and by time intervals.”
But many feral dogs in cities ultimately gravitate toward
impoverished and abandoned neighborhoods, where hiding places
and accessible garbage are more plentiful, and people are not.
In depopulating Rust Belt cities, where nature is reclaiming
entire swaths of the landscape, packs of dogs and colonies of
cats are living in a world that’s nearly their own. New York
Times Magazine writer Benoit Denizet-Lewis, who’s writing a book
about dogs, spent time with Grim in East St. Louis and describes
a world where people are scarce and dogs live wild once again.
“You’d have these abandoned buildings in grassy areas, an urban
prairie that’s a perfect spot for these dogs,” he says. “You
have dogs who were born out there who have had almost no contact
with humans at all. We’d see them roaming in packs in the
distance.” Grim says he’s seen some of these packs stick
together for more than 20 years, spawning new generations to
replace the old.
Feral dog packs are organized into hierarchies, just like
wolves, and in the feral packs of Moscow it’s been observed that
it’s usually the most intelligent dogs, not the most aggressive,
that become pack leaders. For the wildest of these dogs, the
ones that are several generations removed from domesticity, “It
would be almost impossible to rescue them at this point,” says
Denizet-Lewis. “They’ve been living without human interaction
for too long.”
An extensive 1973 study of “free-ranging” dogs in Baltimore —
still one of the few large-scale studies that exists on the
topic — found that some of these dogs were relearning to hunt.
But Grim says they’re more often stuck between wild and
domesticated, able to activate their hunting instinct but not
sure what to do when they’ve caught something. “We’ve bred that
ability out of them. They kill pigeons but then just carry them
around,” he says. “If I open one up for them, they’ll eat the
meat.”
The Baltimore study also discovered that urban renewal efforts
were wiping whole territories of feral dogs off the map. “The
boarding up of buildings and their eventual clearance raises
interesting ecological questions regarding the fate of the dogs
that use them …Will urban renewal increase dog mortality?” The
report concluded that “future slum clearance should consider the
fate of the dogs displaced.”
The idea that the fate of feral dogs and cats should be
considered when neighborhoods rapidly change sounds almost like
a parody of liberal do-gooder thinking. But is it really so
crazy? These are cities where some dying dogs and cats go to
hospice centers and ICUs. The more we learn about the habits and
intelligence of feral animals, the less inclined we may be to
see their lives as disposable.
Some cities are already moving in that direction. The Washington
Post recently reported on the rise of trap-neuter-release (TNR)
for urban feral cats as an alternative to euthanasia, a shift
that rests on the assumption that they aren’t better off dead.
But perhaps surprisingly, animal-rights group PETA doesn’t
support TNR. “They need to be taken off the streets,” says PETA
president Ingrid Newkirk, and if that means humanely euthanizing
them, Newkirk says that’s better than the short, brutish life
they’ll suffer while homeless. “There’s traffic, weather,
illness, injury,” says Newkirk. “People like to have a go at
these animals.”
Grim agrees that the life of these dogs and cats can be hell:
“Right now I have 500 to 600 dogs in our system, and 70 percent
of them have gunshot wounds.” Starvation is never far off (when
temperatures drop below freezing, thirst can also be a problem).
Disease claims even more of them, and humans are the biggest
threat of all, as the fiasco in Harrisburg shows.
As it stands, solutions seem to be growing more distant, not
closer. Like the feral population itself, it’s a problem with no
owner, largely hidden from view but getting bigger all the time.
Eventually, it may come back to bite us. |
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