Feral Dogs

A Pennsylvania city instructs police to shoot strays, opening a sad window on animal care in the age of austerity 

The city of Harrisburg, Pa., learned this last week when an internal police department memo went public, instructing officers of the cash-strapped city to stop bringing its growing number of stray dogs to the shelter. Instead, it said, they should release them in another area, adopt them themselves — or just put a bullet in them. Now that’s the new austerity.

Amid the predictable outcry, the city promised it would reconsider the policy. But the controversy also illuminated a serious — and largely ignored — urban issue: the soaring number of feral cats and dogs, and cities’ decreasing ability to deal with them. “The problem is way worse than people assume,” says Randy Grim, founder of Stray Rescue of St. Louis. “It’s a topic nobody talks about, but over the past 20 years it’s become an underground epidemic in most cities.”

There are lots of reasons for this — reduced animal control, the resurgence of dogfighting —  but at base, the feral explosion has coincided with our ever-rising demand for furry little friends. America is turning into a nation of pet hoarders. In 1970 we had 30 million pet cats; today we have 90 million. Dog ownership has tripled since the 1960s. And the more we take in, the more we drop back on the street, where they procreate at a speed that would make Rick Santorum beam. The exact number of feral dogs and cats is unknown, but there are certainly well over 100 million at this point.

The epidemic has gone largely unnoticed because urban feral dogs and cats have extraordinary skills at remaining invisible. Grim, a fixture in St. Louis who’s been working with feral dogs there for decades, says the dogs emerge from alleys and abandoned buildings to look for food in early dawn or bad weather. “They understand how to survive. Most of them spend only 10 percent of their time being visible to people.”

Same goes for cats, says Jeff Horn, who completed a groundbreaking study of feral cat behaviors last year. Horn fitted 42 cats with radio tracking collars in the neighboring Illinois cities of Champaign and Urbana. “Some of the male cats are really only active for a small portion of the night,” he says. Females, on the other hand, are so often either pregnant or nursing that “they were active up to 20 hours a day just to find food to survive and feed their young.” And Horn was surprised by how large a range the cats staked out. Together, they prowled a region of some 6,286 acres, and a single cat roamed over 1,351 acres, an area greater than one-and-a-half Central Parks.

That territory included everything from forest to concrete jungle — feral dogs and cats are remarkably adaptive to different environments. Moscow’s feral dogs even use the subway to expand their territories. “They orient themselves in a number of ways,” Russian animal behaviorist Andrei Neuronov told the Financial Times. “They figure out where they are by smell, by recognizing the name of the station from the recorded announcer’s voice, and by time intervals.”

But many feral dogs in cities ultimately gravitate toward impoverished and abandoned neighborhoods, where hiding places and accessible garbage are more plentiful, and people are not. In depopulating Rust Belt cities, where nature is reclaiming entire swaths of the landscape, packs of dogs and colonies of cats are living in a world that’s nearly their own. New York Times Magazine writer Benoit Denizet-Lewis, who’s writing a book about dogs, spent time with Grim in East St. Louis and describes a world where people are scarce and dogs live wild once again. 

“You’d have these abandoned buildings in grassy areas, an urban prairie that’s a perfect spot for these dogs,” he says. “You have dogs who were born out there who have had almost no contact with humans at all. We’d see them roaming in packs in the distance.” Grim says he’s seen some of these packs stick together for more than 20 years, spawning new generations to replace the old.