Dogs are great for our health, but they also have a dark side

It is estimated that there are about billion domesticated dogs in the world. Most are animals with owners – pet, company or work animals that share their lives with humans.

According to, dogs are the most common large predator in the world. Pets come far behind – with about 220 million.

Wild dogs are often seen as threats to biodiversity.

On the other hand, our company dogs often seem to have a free pass. This fact is based more on Feelings than in Dados.

Our pet dogs have a much greater, more insidious and more worrying effect on wildlife and the environment than would be expected.

The damage caused by company dogs and the that can be done to avoid them.

Dogs are predators. They catch many types of wild animals and can hurt or kill them. Its smell and waste scare the smaller animals. In addition, there is the enormous environmental cost of feeding these carnivores and the huge amount of excrement they produce.

Dogs are domesticated wolvescreated to be smaller, more docile and extremely sensitive to human, but are still predators.

Company dogs are responsible for more attacks on wild animals than catsaccording to data from wildlife care centers, and catch larger animals.

Dogs of company without leash are the main reason why small penguin colonies are on the edge of collapse in Tasmania.

When they are without leash, Dogs love to pursue animals and birds – It may seem harmless. But the persecution can exhaust tired migratory birdsforcing them to spend more energy. Dogs can poultry that nests on the beach, including birds on extinction.

The simple presence of these predators terrifies many animals and birds. Even when they have leash, the Local Wildlife is on maximum alert. This has measurable negative effects on the abundance and diversity of birds in forest zones in eastern Australia.

In the United States, deer are more alert and run faster and further if they see a human with a dog with leash than a human alone.
Several species of mammals in the United States considered Dogs with a human as a greater threat than coyotes.

The dogs They don’t even have to be present to be bad for wildlife, as they mark trees and posts with their urine and leave their feces in many places.

These act as warnings for many other species. Investigators in the US found that animals such as deer, foxes and even lynice avoided areas where dogs had walked regularly compared to canine exclusion zones due to the traces they left.

Os medications we use to rid our dogs with fleas or ticks They can last weeks and be washed when they dive into a stream or a river. But some of these medications have highly toxic ingredients for aquatic invertebrates, which means that a quick dive can be devastating.

The researchers found that when aves like the blue hail and the real chapim Collect by the brushed dog To line your nestsThis can lead to a lower hatching of eggs and a larger number of dead.

And then there is Cocó. In the US, there are about 90 million pet dogs, while in the United Kingdom 12 million and 6 million in Australia.

One Middle dog deposits 200 grams of feces e 400 milliliters of urine per daywhich translates into a metric ton of feces and 2,000 liters of urine over 13 years of life. In terms of scale, it is a Mountain of waste.

This waste flow can Increase nitrogen pollution in watercourses, Change soil chemistry and even propagate diseases to humans and others wildlife. More than 80% of pathogenic agents that infect domestic animals also infect wild animals.

Dogs eat mostly meat, which means that Millions of cows and chickens are created only to feed our pets. Feed dogs from around the world generates approximately the same emissions as the Philippines and a “footprint” of land use twice as bigger than the UK.

Your company makes us healthier, body and mind. Many Thursdays could not work without the Work dogs.

Dogs, of course, are not bad. They are animals, with natural instincts, as well as the domesticated instinct to please us. But their large number means that they cause real damage.

The choice of having a dog implies responsibilities. Being a good owner of a dog means taking care of not only the animal we love, but also the rest of the natural world.