One of the things we run into of course is a continuous stream of new dogs coming into the shelter. This has two reasons basically:
1) puppies born of existing dogs
2) dogs and puppies and cats being thrown out of a car in front of our door.
By the way I am not kidding when saying they are being thrown out of a car, and even from moving cars in front of our shelter.
Only a very few of our female dogs have had an operation sterilization. A few factors which have stopped us from getting to all of them so far are insufficient funding, far away vets, dogs not being healthy enough to be operated upon, or falling out of scope for the procedure (being in heat, being pregnant, being too young, being sick, not good blood values, still suckling pups).
None of the male dogs have yet had any procedure done. This may be beneficial to curb some agression issues.
Since a few months we have started to do a chemical sterilization which keeps the females from coming into heat for a few months. However we also try to just separate them for a few weeks.
At the moment we do not have the fences and walls enough to keep males and females separated from eachother physically and also a few of them will climb well over 2 meter high walls to get to the others.
So for the present we need to continue the chemical type sterilization if we can find funding for that and also meanwhile work on the funding for a physical separation through walls and fences. After that we can move ahead and start sterilizing and castrating the dogs.
Estimated costs of the sterilization and castrations for 60 dogs would be 2000 Euro at least when asked at the animal hospital 50 km drive away. We will try to find other arrangements and prices for this.
Update December 2016: We may be able to get sterilization of 40 dogs done for a price of about 600 Baht each. This is around 650 Euro for 40 dogs (mainly female)! Let’s make this our goal for 2017!!!