Some adoption puppies are euthanised to make room for strays. Photo: AFP
Dozens of puppies are being killed, because Waikato dog owners are not desexing their pets.
Hamilton City Council animal control says litters of dogs are being handed over to their care, including 100 puppies younger than four weeks old in the first three months of the year.
The puppies require intensive care and animal control says fewer people adopting is leaving them with no choice, but to euthanise.
"We never know what's going to arrive on a day," Hamilton City Council animal education and control manager Susan Stanford said. "One day, we had 22 handed over in the first hour, including two litters.
"We accept the litters, because we don't turn people away - we just don't know what would happen if we did or where those puppies would go.
"We take those puppies in, and assess their age and condition, before we make decisions around whether we are able to keep them or, unfortunately, whether we have to put them to sleep."
Stanford said the cost of keeping very young puppies alive was prohibitive.
"Puppies under four weeks old generally don't have teeth and are still dependent on their mothers, so they would have to be bottle-fed several times a day, which is why it's not really realistic for us to look after them," she said.
"Staff would have to take puppies home and feed them at night. We are spending ratepayers' money to do this and the cost of buying puppy formula... it would be over 100 puppies this year we would have to bottle-feed."
Deciding which live and which die is demoralising work for Stanford and her staff.
"Recently, I did a vet morning with my team and we put down 25 dogs that day," she said. "Nine of them were quite young puppies and then there were some older puppies, more in the 12-week range.
"It's really disheartening for myself and my team. We're all here to help and our primary focus should be about keeping Hamilton safe from dog nuisance, but we feel, at the moment, we're the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff, looking after all these puppies that people cannot look after themselves.
"Uncontrolled breeding is a big issue for us."
Stanford said many dog owners simply underestimate the ongoing cost of keeping their pets alive and healthy.
"We believe a lot of it has been impacted by the financial situation at this time, I don't think people realise how expensive it is, when they take on a dog, when you take into account desexing, registering, vaccinating - which happens yearly - microchipping... all those things add up, on top of the day-to-day care and food."
Some owners are reluctant to desex their dogs for a variety of reasons.
"We've had some interesting stories around desexing from people," Stanford said. "We had a dog owner whose male dog had been classified as a menace and was required to be desexed by law.
"He didn't want to do it, because he linked his own masculinity through his dog, so he left the dog with us."
Rounding up roaming dogs is still the council's main business, with 70 percent of their requests last year linked to strays.
"We do have to put down dogs to make space, but we have to put down our adoption dogs, so our officers can bring in more roaming dogs or involved in attacks," Stanford said.
"We had about 6500 requests last year and about 4700 of them related to roaming."
