Life saving math

I was never a math person and I, as most people, wondered what is math going to do for me in real life.

Math proved very useful in my work in animal welfare (I am an active member since 2007). It showed me that a female dog can give birth to up to 20 puppies per year (I look after a stray female dog which gave birth to 12 puppies at once); even if half of them may be killed by accidents or disease or adopted, there are still 10 stray dogs left on the street, 80% of which are females (because people adopt mostly males from a litter of puppies, or, in case they abandon them, they keep the males). Same goes for female dogs which are owned, but whose owners abandon the litters twice a year, as a practice to control the canine population in their households. But this is an extreme case, it has been established that a stray dog may give birth to 8 live puppies per year; try and do the math yourselves. For each stray or abandoned (thus, stray) female dog resulted from the equation above, please re-apply same formula…you will be blown away.

Another painful math lesson for me is the last year’s balance in Moreni, my hometown. We managed to spay/neuter a total of 427 animals (mostly dogs), both stray and owned (thanks to Romania Animal Rescue and their donors), we also rescued a total of 140 animals, while the local authorities and “concerned citizens” managed to kill an approximate number of 600 stray dogs (poisoned, shot, trapped and killed in the public shelter since September 2013 until present). But still, last week I found 4 litters of puppies when walking for 30 minutes around town.

One of 5 puppies born on the streets this autumn

One of 2 puppies, the second one got killed by a car. This one is lucky enough to be fed by a family.

Three out of 5 puppies, they are fed by this nice lady

Two of I don't know how many puppies, very hungry

Because the local authorities killed so many spayed/neutered dogs from the streets, which lived there for years and were protected by the local communities, now Moreni’s streets are filling up with fertile dogs, bringing our town back before 2006 when we first started to organize free spay/neuter campaigns.

Last year I heard a great slogan, saying “dogs can’t add, cats can’t subtract, but they sure can multiply”. They may not know math, but there is no excuse for their owners not to do the math and be responsible. There is no easy way to solve the stray dogs’ problem in Romania. No matter how many dogs are killed (not euthanized, killed), there will always be more dogs born and abandoned on the streets, because, according to my math lesson, every female dog can give birth to 8 - 20 puppies every year.

This is not a report about feelings, about wishful thinking, about women who can’t do anything else with their lives but dedicate it to mutts; this is a report about math. And about INDIFFERENCE. 

Note: this report is based on personal experience gathered in 8 years, in a small town in Romania.