Hacker News Reader

Comment by sMarsIntruder | Hacker News Reader

> There are approximately 300 million street dogs across Asia

Didn’t expect that number honestly.

Asia has 4.5 billion humans. So that works out around 15 persons per dog. Seems quite spot-on given that these dogs will eat on leftovers and whatever humans throw to them. I wonder if they derived the number that way (highly doubt they are id-ing all these dogs).

There are a bunch of methods for doing field surveys of animal population in the wild, but they don't work so well for large animals. I'm curious how they estimated it, too.

But surprising nonetheless! I just thought of 15 times my city population and it is astounding.

Compared to “only” 500 millions pigs, the number of dogs is astounding. No wonder many countries also use them as food.

Dogs as food?

Yes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog_meat

While traveling SE Asia I didn't see that very often. Besides in some rural areas (and even there), dogs turned into pets as in western "civilization" and their owners didn't want to eat them anymore.

When I was in Hanoi in 2010, in the central districts as unrural as you can get in Vietnam, skinned dog carcasses were hanging at a number of markets. If westernization has had an impact, it must be more recent than that. I’m curious to go back and see for myself.

My understanding is that young people are starting to turn against dog meat consumption, but it's still very common in the north.

In germany it was forbidden only in 1986. But it's been a taboo for a longer time.

People will eat anything when necessary. This is a famous restaurant menu from the 1870 siege of Paris: https://www.messynessychic.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Me...

It contains entries such as Consommé d'Eléphant, Le Civet de Kangourou, and Le Chat flanquè de Rats

Even rat sounds fancy in French.

Seems the Paris Zoo soon became empty :)

Why not? Have you tasted one?

This number seems a little bit off. About 900 million pigs are slaughtered in Asia per year [1] That's 2.5 million dead pigs a day. Since we need live animals to breed more for killing them and it takes time before they are killed, this suggests that at any given time more than a billion pigs are alive in Asia.

But good thing that we sterilized those 150000 dogs, anything else would have been inhumane [2]

[1] https://faunalytics.org/global-animal-slaughter-statistics-a... [2] Sorry, I'm bitter.

According to a random page I found online, pigs are typically slaughtered at 5-6 months old, so assuming a stable population, you'd expect the number of living pigs (raised for slaughter) at any time to be 42%-50% of the yearly amount, so 375,000,000 - 450,000,000 going purely off of your 900,000,000 figure, making 500,000,000 a reasonable estimate, no?

Wow, that is sooner than I expected. I was thinking along the lines of 12 month and thought, nah, that's too quick. Thank you!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com