Importance of Stray Dogs in Ecosystem
Stray Dogs Importance. Importance of stray dogs in ecosystem. How their removal can be disastrous. Dogs have important role in Ecosystem. They play role in disease reduction in environment. Besides consuming the animal waste, they also reduce the garbage. Furthermore, they also consume the dead bodies of wild birds and animals. On the other hand, they also consume the human food leftover. So there permanent removal can be a disastrous. | Authors: Prof. Dr. M. Tariq Javed, Dr. Narmeen Tariq, Dr. Aira Tariq
بے سہارا جانوروں کا سہارا بننے والی خاتون انصار گل
کتوں کا قتل، اینیمل ویلفیئر، متعلقہ ادارے اور ٹی این وی آر۔۔ مضامینِ نو، ڈاکٹر محمد جاسر آفتاب
ALLAH has not made anything useless in the universe. Every creature has its own role in the ecosystem. Similarly, dogs have their own role in the ecosystem. We domesticate the dogs because they are human friendly and also have a role in the life of human but they were created to live independently in the ecosystem.
Importance of Stray Dogs in Ecosystem
Their main role is to remove the sick or diseased and dead creatures from the environment, so the environment remains the clean. They wander here and there in the wild in search of food and have great smelling power. Because of the latter, they can follow the smell and reach the target. They especially find easy targets, the easiest targets are the dead animals and birds in the wild and they eat them. Thus, our environment remains clean and thus they have a role in the ecosystem.
Sometimes, they do carry some dangerous organisms with them and thus can transmit the disease if get in contact with the humans or its food chain. But overall, this is a very rare situation. As the human population have grown tremendously, the stray dogs can find easy food for themselves, thus especially, during the night time they come and invade the human settling to find the food in the form of discarded food items. Again, this is good for the ecosystem as the left over food or discarded food outside the houses of human settling is removed by these excellent creatures.
When, the dogs wander in the human settling in the search of food, the incidents of a dog bite can happen and do happen, but occasionally. In such instances, again only in very few cases they can transmit the deadly diseases if the dogs carry them, the likes of rabies.
Campaign against Stray Dogs
It has been seen recently, that there are some groups working to neuter the stray dogs, it looks with the clear thinking to remove them from the ecosystem and only domesticated dogs will remain. In the recent past, some organisations were also working to kill them by different means including by giving strychnine or by shooting them. Let s, say by killing and neutering together, will eliminate the dogs from the ecosystem of a country, then did anybody realize what can happen?
How Stray Dogs play role in Ecoystem
If there were no dogs in the ecosystem, then, who could have removed the sick or dead animals and birds from the environment? If the dead birds and animals are present everywhere in the wild, which the putrefying organisms putrefy, you can imagine, how much foul smell would have been in the environment. The gasses produced by the putrefying organisms will disturb the environment with the decrease in the level of oxygen while the increase in many other types of gasses. All these will definitely impact upon the change in the microflora of the ecosystem. Furthermore, because of too much and everywhere activity of the putrefying organisms, it itself will cause an increase in number of such organisms, again disturbing the balance of the microflora.
Now, under the scenario, should we try to eliminate the dogs from our ecosystem, as we have already lost the vulture population, the latter died because of indiscriminate use of diclofenac sodium, which was present in the body of dead animal as were injected in the effort to treat the sick animals.
Recommendations to Control Stray Dogs
Therefore, It has to be debated rigorously before making room for different organisations and groups to work for their elimination. Considering the situation in an advanced world, where they control the population of stray dogs, but the humans have taken up the role of removing the dead birds and animals. In fact they even investigate every death in the wild through a setup. Now, do we have such kind of setup in our system at the Government or non-government level. Furthermore, how much sincerity is their in job disposition.
These are few questions to be answered before making any move, which otherwise can lead to a disastrous situation, as was faced by Chinese when they removed sparrows (birdingbeijing.com/2015/07/09/exterminating-sparrows-a-lesson-from-history/).
The solutions to this problem can be to vaccinate all the stray dogs and other such animals which can be the reservoirs of the rabies virus, for which the local vaccine production facilities may be asked to produce the vaccine. Secondly, produce a large amount of anti-rabies serum, make it available at village level and administer the serum to every dog bite case, irrespective the biting dog is showing the signs of rabies or not, as there are always carrier dogs those don t show the signs of rabies.
