Abstract
1. BackgroundDog population management is required in many locations to minimise the risks dog populations may pose to human health and to alleviate animal welfare problems. In many cities in India, Animal Birth Control (ABC) projects have been adopted to provide population management. Measuring the impact of such projects requires assessment of dog population size among other relevant indicators.MethodsThis paper describes a simple mark-resight survey methodology that can be used with little investment of resources to monitor the number of roaming dogs in areas that are currently subject to ABC, provided the numbers, dates and locations of the dogs released following the intervention are reliably recorded. We illustrate the method by estimating roaming dog numbers in three cities in Rajasthan, India: Jaipur, Jodhpur and Jaisalmer. In each city the dog populations were either currently subject to ABC or had been very recently subject to such an intervention and hence a known number of dogs had been permanently marked with an ear-notch to identify them as having been operated. We conducted street surveys to record the current percentage of dogs in each city that are ear-notched and used an estimate for the annual survival of ear-notched dogs to calculate the current size of each marked population.ResultsDividing the size of the marked population by the fraction of the dogs that are ear-notched we estimated the number of roaming dogs to be 36,580 in Jaipur, 24,853 in Jodhpur and 2,962 in Jaisalmer.ConclusionsThe mark-resight survey methodology described here is a simple way of providing population estimates for cities with current or recent ABC programmes that include visible marking of dogs. Repeating such surveys on a regular basis will further allow for evaluation of ABC programme impact on population size and reproduction in the remaining unsterilised dog population.
Highlights
Dog population management is required in many locations to minimise the risks dog populations may pose to human health and to alleviate animal welfare problems
The mark-resight survey methodology described here is a simple way of providing population estimates for cities with current or recent Animal Birth Control (ABC) programmes that include visible marking of dogs
Repeating such surveys on a regular basis will further allow for evaluation of ABC programme impact on population size and reproduction in the remaining unsterilised dog population
Summary
Dog population management is required in many locations to minimise the risks dog populations may pose to human health and to alleviate animal welfare problems. With the spread of urbanisation throughout the developing world the population of roaming dogs (i.e. dogs that are neither confined nor restricted, sometimes known as “street”, “stray” or “free-ranging” dogs) in urban areas has the potential to increase Such dogs can suffer from welfare problems and can present a human health risk, most notably rabies, with 99% of human rabies deaths due to rabies transmission from infected dogs [1]. At the time of sterilisation and vaccination (or vaccination only in the case of adult males in Jaipur) all dogs are earnotched whilst under anaesthetic before being released at the point of capture It is this ear-notch ‘mark’ that is used during the resight stage of the survey. Resight data was collected using two methods; either during specific surveys to estimate the percentage of ear-notched dogs or opportunistically at the time of capturing dogs for ABC when all dogs observed are required to be checked for the presence of an ear-notch
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