We don't lock up either of those groups and kill them if no one comes for them within a week (or four days, in this case). A lot of cat owners (e.g. all my moms cat-owning neighbors) seem to consider it practically abusive to deny their pets the "freedom" to prowl the neighborhood, walking on our windshields, dumping our trashcans and tormenting our dogs by sunning themselves in plain sight but well out of reach. I'm not sure why the same thing can be treated as a virtual right for cats but a torment for dogs.

For the record, I've most definitely stepped outside a city before, in fact, what probably got my first dog killed (we don't know because we never found him) was that he'd grown up at my grandparents house in the country and when my dad brought him to Houston nothing we did would keep him in the yard: One day he just didn't come home. City dogs dumped in the country by city folk who think it's some kind of doggy buffet are probably in worse shape, because they never learned to hunt live prey or deal with natural predators but, particularly in America, we throw out enough food annually and dogs have sensitive enough noses perpetually to sustain a population of strays a lot better than euthanizing shelters evidently can. I've taken in a few strays over the years, too, and the ones who were malnourished were usually the ones who already had serious health issues. Perhaps it's an ethical dilemma: How many more healthy dogs is it acceptable to "humanely" kill in cold blood so that a far smaller fraction don't starve on the streets? While we're deciding that, perhaps we should consider the ethics of needles and gas applied to Malthusian principles for other overpopulated species like cats, deer, pigeons and humans.