For nearly a decade, Zero Stray Pawject has maintained an unequivocal position that culling and euthanasia are completely ineffective means of population control. They are not just unethical, they also never achieve the elimination of strays.
Instead, Zero Stray Pawject focuses on prevention to reduce the number of unwanted strays systematically and sustainably, by focusing on owned pets and their proclivity to overproduce beyond the capacity of society to absorb these animals into their households. This prevention model has been successfully tested in our proof-of-concept efforts on the island of Aegina.
In Greece culling is illegal. However, incidents of mass poisoning are unfortunately familiar and frequent, despite being prosecuted as a felony.
But let us explain, apart from the moral issue, why killing is not effective.
Our premise (proven in real life) is that even if one had a magic wand and could take all stray dogs and cats off the street and place them into loving homes today, over time that community will have the exact same amount of stray dogs and cats in the streets.
Strays don’t grow on trees. They are a man-made problem. Strays exist because owners intentionally or unintentionally found themselves with litters they could not find homes for. They exist because owned dogs and cats that became unwanted, could not be rehomed because demand for dogs and cats had been exhausted. Illegal abandonment is often the result of that, even if that abandonment happened generations ago. The problem is a supply and demand mismatch among owned pets, with the excess supply finding its way to the street through various paths. At present in Greece, this excess supply cannot be housed in shelters and foster homes. It is impossible and impractical to build a capacity to house the millions of strays that exist in Greece.
Abandonment of these unwanted pets is possible because dogs and cats that are abandoned are anonymous. They cannot tell you who abandoned them. A big part of the solution is to de-anonymize dogs and cats by enforcing microchipping and enforcing DNA sampling from unneutered owned pets.
Demand is inelastic. This supply and demand mismatch cannot be balanced by increasing demand. There will never be enough families to adopt every stray dog and cat. The target must be to reduce supply.
The supply of unwanted animals must be reduced systematically and sustainably to balance it with the demand in the community. In other words, a country should focus on controlling the excess population not by perpetually killing strays (the outcome of the problem), but by preventing the birth of these unwanted pets in the first place. In plain language, it is far more effective to focus on the percent of owned pets that are neutered and providing incentives for neutering and disincentives for not neutering.
