Tuesday, February 17, 2009

Rescue Numbers - Update

On December 17, 2008 I posted some numbers from petfinder listing the amount of certain breeds available for adoption. We saw an overall count of 1325 less dogs in rescue at the beginning of December in comparison to two months earlier - in October.

Again, I'll re-iterate that I'm not posting this to depress anyone, but I believe that people should all be aware of the sheer numbers we face out there. As long as people continue to adopt animals from shelters than we're making progress.

Here are the numbers from that day in December:
American Staffordshire Terrier 3,276
Australian Cattle Dog/Blue Heeler 3,212
Australian Shepherd 3,424
Beagle - 7,851 dogs
Black Lab - 4,860 dogs
Border Collie - 4,829 dogs
Boxer - 5,793 dogs
Chihuahua - 7,434 dogs
Dachshund - 3,787 dogs
German Shepherd - 7,504 dogs
Labrador Retriever - 19,845 dogs
Pitbull Terrier - 10,355
Rottweiler 3,535
Shepherd 8,650
Terrier 7,204

Anything over 3,000 I have listed - anything less than that I have considered a manageable number. Our running tally of these breeds in December was 101,559.

Here are the numbers for today:
American Staffordshire Terrier 3,427
Australian Cattle Dog/Blue Heeler 3,016
Australian Shepherd 3,319
Beagle - 7,253
Black Lab - 4,606
Border Collie - 4,601
Boxer - 5,960
Chihuahua - 6,846
Dachshund - 3,481
German Shepherd Dog - 7,099
Labrador Retriever - 19,162
Pitbull Terrier - 10,968
Rottweiler 3,606
Shepherd 8,235
Terrier 6,662

That brings our running tally to 98,241! Wow - that is 3,318 less dogs! That's a huge amount of dogs that have found homes. Petfinder has a total number of 179,724 dogs available counting all the different breeds listed.

What does this mean? Spay and neuter your pets people. I don't care how kyoot your poopsie-poo is - that's not a good reason to breed him/her.

Don't forget - I don't have any problem with Responsible Breeding. But the keyword in there is "Responsible".

7 comments:

OldMorgans said...

Thanks for posting the numbers. Let's hope that the numbers continue to stay down. The speuter message needs to get out to so many more people, but there has been progress.

sagebeasties.blogspot.com

Thoughts said...

Any progress on this front is good. thanks for the update.

Splash said...

Is "Black Lab" included in the count for "Labrador Retriever"? I can see counting black dogs (of all kinds) separately, as they have adoption issues.

DogsDeserveFreedom said...

Good question Splash, but no, it's not included unless the dog is listed twice (once as Black Labrador and once as Labrador Retriever). Petfinder sees those as two separate breeds.

Snowball said...

W@W!!! Those figures are scary. I hope hoomans can learn to be more responsible.

Luv
Snowball

Unknown said...

I don't think that this is a good way to mark of progress, a lot of shelters are shutting down under the pressure of the economy, and the animals are being euthanized.

The MSPCA is currently shutting it's doors throughout Massachusetts due to a major lack of funding. That affects the numbers as much as spaying, neutering and adoption...

DogsDeserveFreedom said...

Stormslegacy - no, it's not the best way to track these things ... but what would you suggest as a better tool to use to track these stats??

If you have a better way, please feel free to let me know and I'll use that instead. I'm always looking to find better ways to do things.