Rabies is a worldwide threat, and 99 percent of human cases are attributed by the World Health Organization (WHO) to dog bites or scratches.
Although there is a rabies vaccine that can be taken after a bite, when someone is bitten on the face or near a nerve, it is not always effective.
Four-year-old Nirmal was playing outside when he was attacked by a stray dog in the Indian city of Arakonam in July.
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His father had only been away for a few minutes when the animal bit the boy's mouth.
"I only entered the house to get water," his father Balaji told local media.
"When I came back, I saw him with injuries around his mouth. He was bleeding profusely."
Nirmal's family rushed him to the hospital, where he remained in intensive care for 15 days.
Eventually, his condition stabilized and he was discharged.
But not long after he got home, he started showing symptoms of rabies.
His family took him back to the hospital, where they learned that the virus had infected his nervous system.
Nirmal died two days later.
Sometimes children are afraid to tell their families that they have been bitten by dogs, which prevents them from getting a rabies vaccine before it is too late.
In Mumbai, between 1994 and 2015, 1,3 million people were bitten by dogs, and 434 of them died of rabies.
But attacks are not the only risks posed by stray dogs.
According to the global charity International Coalition for Companion Animal Management (ICAM), other dangers of uncontrolled stray dog populations include traffic accidents, risk to livestock, and people being afraid to walk down the street.
Turkey's new controversial approach
Stray dogs are a growing problem for Turkey, and the country's veterinary association estimates that there are around 6,5 million stray dogs.
Stray dog attacks have killed more than 100 people in Turkey in the past two years, either directly or as a result of traffic accidents, according to the local Association for Safe Streets.
At the end of July this year, the Turkish government passed a law forcing municipalities to place all stray dogs in shelters within the next four years - with the threat of jail time for mayors who do not comply.
"They attack children, adults, the elderly and other animals," Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said a day after the bill was sent to parliament for adoption.
"They cause traffic accidents."
Since 2004, municipalities have been required by law to round up, vaccinate and sterilize stray dogs and then return them to the same street they were picked up from.
This is known as the CNVR method - which is an acronym for "catch, sterilize, vaccinate, release".
Many experts see it as the best solution - but President Erdogan said it did not work.
This is because 70 percent of stray dogs must be sterilized for the method to be effective, says Dr. Gulaj Ertur from the Turkish Veterinary Medical Society.
Under the new law, dogs will still be sterilized and vaccinated, but after that they will be placed in shelters (until they are adopted or die) instead of being returned to the streets.
The Federation for the Protection of Animals warns that this new system will be expensive and that the huge outdoor shelters mean that the stronger dogs will prevent the weaker ones from eating, and diseases can spread quickly among them.
Dr Eli Hibi, director of ICAM, says it is "a potentially more expensive way to fail equally" and that shelters will fill up quickly.
Protests against the new law were held in Turkey and other countries.
We reached out to the Turkish authorities for comment, but did not hear back prior to publication of this article.
Effective reduction of the number of strays
Dr. Hibi from ICAM says that neutering dogs early in their lives is key to reducing the number of strays.
In this way, stray dogs cannot reproduce, and if a pet dog is lost or abandoned, it cannot reproduce and increase the stray population.
What doesn't work, she says, is "removing dogs from the streets without addressing the source of the next generation of stray dogs."
Stray dogs continue to breed all the time, and one dog can have up to 20 puppies a year.
Therefore, if some of them are removed from the street (by extermination or placement in shelters), it will not reduce their number in the long run, she adds.
The extermination of dogs (sometimes by killing them in public or euthanizing them in shelters) is seen as cruel by many, especially animal rights activists, and can be disturbing to those who witness them being shot or poisoned in the streets.
Psychotherapist and mental health nurse Debbie Wilson, who is writing a PhD entitled "Respecting Children's Rights Means Respecting Animal Rights" at the University of Huddersfield in England, says witnessing animal cruelty reduces children's empathy and increases their chances of behaving themselves. cruel to animals and other people when they grow up.
The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child states that children must be protected from exposure to violence against animals.
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Successes around the world
Bosnia and Herzegovina and Thailand have recently had success in reducing the number of stray dogs using the catch, sterilize, vaccinate, release method.
The Dogs Trust Bosnia foundation says that capturing, sterilizing, vaccinating and returning dogs led to an 85 percent reduction in the number of strays in the capital, Sarajevo, between 2012 and 2023.
In Sarajevo Canton, a municipality that includes the capital itself, the number of stray dogs has decreased by 70 percent.
The country has had to train more vets to keep the sterilization rate of the stray dog population above 70 percent - the level necessary to cause the overall number to decline.
The charity Dogs Trust has also run campaigns to raise awareness of the benefits of neutering, aimed at dog owners.
The number of veterinary clinics has more than doubled, providing better care for both owned and stray dogs.
After the success of the program in Sarajevo, it was expanded to the rest of the canton in 2015.
Last year in Thailand, the Soi Dog Foundation became the first organization in history to sterilize and vaccinate a million stray animals in the last 20 years.
More than half a million strays were caught in the capital city of Bangkok alone.
This long process started on a much smaller scale on the island of Phuket in 2003.
"Everything starts with gaining trust in the local community," says Dr. Alisja Izidorchik, international animal welfare director at the Soi Dog Foundation.
In Phuket, they managed to reduce the population of stray dogs from 80.000 to 6.000.
After this success, they transferred these methods to Bangkok, which had a much larger population of strays.
But the project encountered various obstacles on the way.
About five years ago, the Thai government launched a program to move every stray dog to a shelter - similar to Turkey's new policy - only to realize that this was not sustainable, as it resulted in a massive overcrowding of shelters.
Both the Thai and Bosnian projects have led to a reduction in the population of stray dogs, as well as cases of rabies and bites.
They also improved the quality of life for the stray dogs themselves, says Dr. Hibi.
Countries that are still struggling
Officials in Morocco recently began exterminating dogs in huge numbers.
Although the government has not offered any reason, some believe it could have something to do with the country hosting the 2025 Africa Cup of Nations and co-hosting the 2030 FIFA World Cup.
Ali Izdin, founder of the Humane Society of Morocco and coordinator of the Moroccan Animal Protection Association, says the country does not have a TNVR (treat, sterilize, vaccinate, release) program.
The Humane Society of Morocco estimates that the country has a stray population of three million and that 500.000 of them are exterminated every year.
Most exterminations are done by shooting them or poisoning them in public.
Extermination does not work, says Izdin, because "surviving stray dogs breed more often, have larger litters with a higher survival rate and take the place of killed dogs".
Izdin's organization says it recently learned that Morocco has ordered three million doses of lethal injections to kill more stray dogs ahead of two major soccer events.
This has not been confirmed or reported by any official source.
We sought comment from the Moroccan government, the municipality of Casablanca and the municipality of Marrakesh, but did not receive any response prior to publishing the text.
Dr Hibi says current trends show an improvement in the management of the global stray dog population - which has to do with public pressure - as people demand a more humane method of managing dog numbers.
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