Feeding strays makes them dependent. Is it a myth?
You've probably heard the statement about how "if you feed a stray animal once, it is going to stay" and this is presented as if it is a bad thing but this also isn't necessarily true. There are a lot of "roaming stray dogs" in Krabi that kind of bounce from house to house at places where they have received food in the past but it isn't necessarily a bad thing. Many of these dogs will tend to protect the properties that give them food, almost like they appreciate the support and are going to do whatever they can to repay you but much like a trash can area getting continually knocked over, there is a very good chance that a dog is going to return to a source of food if it consistently pays off for them.
I don't like to hear what I heard the other day though when someone was suggesting that we shouldn't feed stray dogs because they become dependent upon it and it will make a problem for the dogs.
While this person is probably correct to some degree, what is the alternative? Let them starve to death? I don't know many people that are this heartless.
Feeding a stray is the right thing to do but this is really only doing half of the job. It has been proven over and over again that if a stray pack is well-fed and not struggling for food, they will replicate and have as many babies as they possibly can. It sounds awful but it is very true that starvation is a way of nature controlling a population because a population of any species will only grow to the size that their food source can possibly maintain, anything above that will starve and only the strongest members of the pack will survive. That is a pretty nasty way to think about life in general but you have probably heard of theories of evolution and this is how dominant genes are passed down to the "herd."
So in a way yes, feeding strays does make them dependent but stray dogs aren't exactly like a pack of hyenas in Africa. Over time dogs the like that we know from our cities, don't really have the mechanisms necessary for properly surviving in the wild, especially not designer breeds that have become popular in the past 100 years or so.
Here at Krabi Animal Welfare we spend a great deal of our time making sure that the homeless animals get enough to eat but we also always combine this with a sterilization program so that this well-fed group doesn't make 100 babies as a result. If dogs lived properly in the wild it would be essential to the species survival as a whole that they have as many offspring as they possibly can and the group would work as a team to make sure that everyone stays fed. Unfortunately, in today's environment that is not how it really works out. Dogs and cats by instinct will have as many offspring as they can but will not have the means to actually feed even themselves, let along 3-7 pups. A great many of unhelped stray puppies succumb to starvation, even with our help.
There is a strong indication here locally that feeding other species is actually quite bad for the population and this is very noticeable with the populations of monkeys in temple grounds as people have taken to selling small bags of fruit so that the tourists can feed the monkeys. This is something that I have always disagreed with the practice of because the monkey population has grown well beyond their natural numbers at some of our local temples and as is often the case in Thailand and elsewhere, the only time that anything gets done about this is after the problem is already beyond help.
In places like Lopburi where the monkey population got well out of control, the government stepped in and started to police the area and got rid of all touts that were selling fruit to tourists. This of course initially caused great problems because the monkeys that had grown accustomed to being fed all of a sudden had their food source cut off so out of hunger they stopped waiting for food and started stealing it and also getting into massive brawls once food was found.
While the government is very quiet about what is being done about this as a solution, there is only one solution and that is to cull the population. Before Krabi Animal Welfare was founded this culling happened on a regular basis with street dogs because there honestly is no other solution. Thankfully, and I believe at least in part because of our existence as an organization, we have implemented a longer-term solution via sterilization. We obviously cannot possibly locate every single newborn pup and sterilize them, but we are doing a lot more than nothing which is what was done before.
If you are in a part of the world where these is a stray dog issue, you absolutely should feed the dogs. However, if this is not combined with a sterilization initiative similar to our own, this will only make the problem worse in the long run. In most countries dog and cat sterilization is extremely inexpensive and in many countries, including Thailand, there is a government paid program where you can take your animal to clinics during certain times of year and get them sterilized for free.
The feeding is a good step towards being a good person, but it must be combined with population control as well. So while it doesn't sound very nice to say and I hate it when I hear it, the answer to whether or not feeding makes stray dogs and cats dependent is "yes." But that doesn't mean that you shouldn't do it because the alternative is to ignore their suffering and we don't want to do that, do we?
If you would like to see how you can help out or simply spread the word, please visit our website at
http://krabianimalwelfare.org
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