New Animal Control.Org

The Five Major Dog-Related Problems Perpetuated by the Current System of Animal Control

1. The steady erosion of the privileges extended to dog owners, and the increasing exclusion of canines from the public life of humans:
   There was a time when people could walk their dogs off lead and take their canine companions with them almost everywhere they went, and many people did. But those days are gone. Now with each passing year there are fewer public places where dogs can be walked off lead. For that matter, as it is, in response to abuses spawned by the current system, every year there are fewer locations where dogs are welcome at all.

2. An epidemic of dog attacks:
   Roughly five million Americans are bitten by dogs every year. Around 800,000 of those injuries are serious enough to require medical attention and 5,000 of those are so severe as to require hospitalization. On average, 20 of our countrymen are mauled to death by canines each year. As a society, dog bites cost us $1 billion dollars a year in medical expenses and liability claims, and another $310 million is eaten up yearly by insurance payouts. Dog attacks are the leading cause of traumatic injury throughout the general population, according to the New England Journal of medicine, and they are the leading health problem among children.
   

3. The euthanasia of an enormous number of dogs:
   Every year, in the United States alone, animal shelters put to death something in the neighborhood of three million dogs. Averaged-out, that comes to a rate of 342 dogs being killed every hour, 24 hours a day, every day of the week, every week of the year. And it has been going on for decades.

4. An epidemic of chronic barking:
   Barking problems can be quickly corrected and easily prevented. Yet tens of millions of people find that they can no longer carry out the activities of daily life inside their own homes, because their dwellings are forever awash in the noxious noise of neighboring dogs. Dogs that bark on, uncorrected, in multiple voices, in shifts or in unison, at all hours of the day and night.

5. The contamination of the world's groundwater supply:
   Although dog feces is a leading cause of preventable water pollution, the movers and shakers of the current system have no plan in place to deal with it, and discussion has just begun concerning the process of developing one.

Click here for an explanation of how the current animal control system perpetuates the problems it was charged with preventing.

This page is part of the Failed System section of New Animal Control.Org