Hundreds of millions of stray dogs live in urban and rural areas globally. Mass culling has been repeatedly shown to be ineffective. Humane population management through vaccination and sterilisation offers better welfare and public health outcomes.
Stray dog welfare encompasses both the suffering of individual animals and the systemic conditions creating stray populations. Individual stray dogs face hunger, injury, disease, vehicle collisions, and fear. Culling programmes add acute welfare harm through painful killing methods while failing to achieve population control. Trap-neuter-vaccinate-return programmes provide health interventions including vaccination and surgical sterilisation (with associated acute welfare costs) in exchange for preventing unwanted reproduction and rabies transmission. The welfare of managed stray dog colonies improves with caretaker feeding and monitoring. Addressing root causes through responsible ownership promotion, microchipping, and sterilisation of owned dogs prevents strays entering the population in the first place.