WellBeing News
Abstract
Three case studies in which WBI partners are addressing dog homelessness in Kabul, Chennai, and Costa Rica are described. In Kabul, Mayhew Afghanistan persuaded the Kabul municipality to stop culling dogs and then launched a rabies vaccination and dog sterilization project. Approximately 80,000 rabies vaccines have been administered to the estimated 40,000 dogs in Kabul, and 20,000 have been sterilized. Cases of human rabies and dog bites have both declined since the project was launched in mid-2017. In Chennai, the Blue Cross of India conceived the idea of surgical sterilization (Animal Birth Control) as a humane method of managing homeless dogs back in 1964. In 1995, the municipal authorities allowed them to launch an ABC program in a section of the city. It proved so successful it was expanded to be city-wide. The number of human rabies cases dropped from around 120 to zero in fifteen years. In Costa Rica, AHPPA began increasing sterilizations in 2006 and is now carrying out almost 30,000 a year. Over the same period, the percentage of owned dogs sleeping indoors at night has increased from 27% to 66%, and the percentage of households with at least one sterilized dog jumped from 18% to 62%.
Recommended Citation
Rowan, Andrew N.
(2021)
"Global Dog Campaign Case Studies: Kabul, Afghanistan; Chennai, India; Heredia, Costa Rica,"
WellBeing News: Vol. 3:
Iss.
10, Article 2.
Available at:
https://www.wellbeingintlstudiesrepository.org/wbn/vol3/iss10/2