I live in Oak Cliff, so I live with stray dogs. They’ve bitten my car’s tires, lounged on my front porch, escorted me to and from the train station, and followed me and my two-year-old from the park to the in-laws only to then tussle with the in-laws’ dogs for a few hours. (On that occassion, like the DMN’s Courtney Keys, I called 3-1-1, who promised to send someone out within twenty-four to forty-eight hours. Awesome.) The question is: does Oak Cliff’s stray population compare with Moscow, which has 84 stray dogs per square mile? I’d love to see Oak Cliff’s stray-per-mile ratio. For now, I’ll just gnaw on this takeaway from this piece in the Financial Times:
Moscow’s strays sit somewhere between house pets and wolves, says Poyarkov, but are in the early stages of the shift from the domesticated back towards the wild. That said, there seems little chance of reversing this process. It is virtually impossible to domesticate a stray: many cannot stand being confined indoors.
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On http://www.readlarrypowell.com, I write about Dallas strays all the time. (Right now we are hosting three “guest dogs” from Oak Cliff in hopes of finding homes for them.) The bleak sadness is that when you see these “strays,” you’re not looking at a dog problem, you’re looking at an idiot people problem. Irresponsible humans allow dogs to roam. Or they “set them free” or they “shoo them off.”
People are the villains in this matter. Yet, it is the dogs who are punished.