Native American tribes used to take care of their wild dog problem with mass killings or complicated "roundups" to adopt our or sterilize the canines, now they're looking at a new approach of administering birth control shots.
Veterinarians hope to give the shots to 300 wild female dogs. The vaccines have previously been successful in animals such as the white-tailed deer, ABC News reported.
The $60,000 study conducted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture's National Wildlife Research Center and Spay First will focus on dogs living around two Native American tribes in the West, in hopes of controlling the ever-growing population.
The tribal members have been feeding the dogs scraps in an attempt to help them, but the population just keeps growing. Spay and neuter expert Ruth Steinberger believes preventing the new litters will do more good than rescuing them after they have already been born.
"The reservation is a better place. ... This is easier to explain in Lakota than in English, but dogs are a part of our lives," said Belva Black Lance, a Rosebud Sioux community advocate who is helping with the study. "They have been in the past and they will be in the future. To be able to take care of them is so important."
The researchers will inject the dogs with a drug called GonaCon, and will also microchip and tattoo them before they are released. A year later the team will go back and test the dog's blood to see if the vaccines were effective. Dr. Jeffrey Young of Planned Pethood Plus, who is not involved in the study, believes the most difficult part will be rounding up the dogs that had received the shots.
"A lot of the animals will die, disappear, get shot, poisoned or hit by a car," he said. "Dogs on reservations have a higher death rate than normal dogs in society."
According to Young wild dogs only live an average of 3.2 years, compared to the 10 to 12 year lifespan of domesticated dogs.
Dog bites cause 95 percent of all rabies cases in the U.S. Spaying and neutering all of the wild dogs would be extremely difficult, the team hopes to one day see a combination of rabies and birth control vaccine used as an alternative.
Young operates a clinic that performs 165,000 surgeries, most of them spay and neuter procedures, this is more than anyone else in the country.
"I would love for something to put me out of that business," he said.
