Photo: Unsplash / Michael Anfang
Auckland Council has announced a joint pilot programme with the SPCA and 17 vet clinics where owners will get vouchers to have their animals de-sexed for free.
West and South Auckland are priority areas for the scheme.
Manurewa-Papakura Ward Councillor Daniel Newman said there were so many roaming dogs in his ward, there were streets where he no longer felt safe walking, and some areas were no-go zones.
Last year, there was a 17 percent increase in dog attacks in the city, with 2846 investigated. Between September and December last year 89 of those attacks were on children.
Newman told Checkpoint there was a need to get roaming dogs of the street and control the population.
"What concerns me is when you have dogs roaming, you have dogs charging, you don't know the dogs temperament."
He said that this de-sexing programme was one way to manage the population of roaming dogs in the community.
"We can't just continue to ramp up the number of enforcement officers, ultimately we need to control this population.
"This is actually quite a small pilot, but it is an important pilot, because every dog that is spayed is a dog that is not out there breeding."
Newman said the problem was not only too many dogs, but also too many bad owners.
"A useless owner who doesn't take responsibility really is a crisis."
He acknowleged that the programme was not going to solve the issue of unresponsible owners, let alone have the capacity to fix the roaming dog crisis entirely.
"There will be dogs that we will desex this year that I have no doubt in the future, we may well have them coming into the care of the animal management shelters.
"In the meantime, I'd be grateful if those dogs weren't breeding."
The programme is expected to de-sex between 400 and 450 dogs to start with.
"That's a small number. Every year, we're actually gonna need to be desexing thousands of dogs in order to try and get on top of this situation."
The programme is ratepayer funded. Newman said while this may be contentious, it was needed to get the issue affecting the community under control.
"There is a community safety issue, the safety of people, the safety of other animals in our community, this is a matter that we can't simply rely on employing more staff for enforcement."
The pilot programme will be rolled out across 10 priority suburbs where a high number of roaming dog complaints have been reported. Those suburbs include Manurewa, Papakura, Ōtara, Papatoetoe, Māngere, Henderson, Massey, Pukekohe, Māngere East and Mount Wellington.
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