Mar 9
The Philippines has a Terrifying Number of Animal Shelters
The world has 200 million freely-roaming urban dogs or so the World Health Organization estimates. An outstanding 6% of that number, 12 million to be exact, can be attributed to the Philippines. This data is according to one of the nation’s only four animal welfare organizations, the Philippines Animal Welfare Society.
The title is not clickbait. With that number of stray dogs, it is terrifying that the Philippines only has 8 animal shelters!
Yes, a country that has 300,000 km² area and 110.8 million as its population only has 8 animal shelters.
This number excludes some smaller shelters that are pure voluntary. They are barely noticeable as there are only 4 of them- well, 4 that revealed their presence on the net. These small shelters only house not more than 50 animals on average.
At least they’re contributing, that’s my comment.
Furthermore, all of these animal shelters are voluntary non-profit organizations, which is common but that also means they cannot financially sustain themselves and are in frequent need of volunteer workers.
Even with an optimistic estimation, there are around 5,000 stray animals that have been sheltered. In other words, in every 240,000 stray dogs, one of them is sheltered- 0.042%
Mange-filled limping dogs are filling the streets as I write this article. If you want to help, adopt not shop. Also donate to your local animal welfare organization if you can. I thank you in advance.
