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Across the globe, these CNVR programmes have become the gold standard to humanely control both stray populations and rabies – a horrible zoonotic disease found in 150 countries, which still kills close to 60,000 people a year, according to the US Centre for Disease Control and Prevention. The vast majority catch the highly fatal pathogen from dogs.
“Vaccination is critical, but you can’t control rabies without also sterilising dogs – otherwise the population just grows and grows, and it’s impossible to continuously vaccinate that many animals,” said Dr Rungpatana. “Reducing the overall population also improves the welfare of the dogs, there’s less competition for food and they’re seen as less of a pest by people.”
Skirting tragedy
The Dalleys’ Soi Dogs programme started with a malnourished, ill-treated canine. In 1996, the then-newlyweds became close to a stray roaming their Phuket hotel grounds. Then it disappeared.
“We found out that hotel security had come along and beaten the dog to death,” said Mr Dalley. “From there, we started paying more attention to the street dogs when we visited the island. It was clearly a problem that was getting bigger and bigger, and nobody was doing anything about it – other than randomly poisoning or killing dogs.”
When the couple eventually took early retirement and moved to Thailand seven years later, they met Ms Homburg – a Dutch expatriate and fellow animal-lover who was already taking sick dogs to the vets to be treated, vaccinated and sterilised.
“I could see exactly what she was trying to do,” said Mr Dalley. “To me that made sense – to sterilise dogs was the logical way to move forward in a country where, officially, euthanasia is not allowed because of Buddhist beliefs. So that’s how it started.”
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