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With October being Adopt A Shelter Dog Month, in addition to the regular Micronesian Monday Features and Friday Weekenders, you’ll get stories about boonie dogs on Guam every Wednesday this month. ²

Encountering free-roaming dogs on Guam is pretty common. Strays are a seemingly perennial issue. Government officials and animal lovers alike have spent years trying to solve the problems that come out of having a sizable stray dog population. The issue comes up in the news cycle every year if not every three months. 

Just this past May, the issue arose as part of a discussion on a bill that updated pet licensing requirements. The bill is expected to help the agriculture department deal with the stray animals on the island. 

“The stray pet population has been a long-standing issue affecting the people of Guam. Some people are unable to walk in their own neighborhoods because of some of these stray animals. Kids walking home from the school bus are in danger of being chased by these strays,” the bill’s author, Sen. Clynt Ridgell said at a public hearing.

Also present at the hearing was the president of the board of directors of the only animal shelter on the island. The shelter, named Guam Animals In Need or GAIN, was founded in 1989.

“As I'm sure everybody already knows on Guam we have a really significant stray dog problem,” Luhr said. “In 2014, GAIN, in collaboration with the Humane Society International, did an island wide survey of the dog problem in Guam. At the time we measured that there was 24,500 stray dogs….We are fairly confident that number’s growing about 3% a year. And so that 25,000 in 2014 is easily over 30,000 and the problem continues to grow.”

The strays on Guam are often referred to as boonie dogs, derived from the expression “boondocks,” which originates from the Tagalog term “bundok.”

I was curious about that baseline number. How does one go about trying to count animals that are wandering free? I didn’t have the answer but I knew someone else out there did. 

According to John Boone, research director of the Great Basin Bird Observatory in Nevada, “Oftentimes with these dog projects, the way of gathering the raw data is somewhat similar. And in this case, it's what we call transit counts.

Boone has worked in animal welfare for over a decade and was part of the project that counted the boonies on Guam in 2014.

While he wasn’t physically on island, Boone helped design the surveys, which were done between February 2014 and May 2014.

“I helped to do some basic analysis of the data that were gathered, and then to put that report together,” Boone said. “So my involvement was remote.”

He said there are different ways to go about counting street dogs. Some methods are more time-consuming, more expensive, more rigorous than others. He recalled Guam needed a method on the more economical side of that spectrum, so they settled on conducting transit counts in different villages. 

“We created some routes along existing roadways and pathways that are meant to provide a good sample of the different kinds of areas on Guam. People walk along those… they do it at certain times of the day, they follow a set of rules so that everything is standardized,” he said. “It's really almost as simple as they walk along, and they record all of the dogs that they see along with certain things about those dogs.” 

Surveyors looked for any unconfined dog outdoors. They checked and recorded whether if the dog was a male or female, whether it was a puppy or an adult dog. They also recorded the dogs’ conditions. If you’ve been face-to-face with a boonie you know that they don’t always look the healthiest.

Boone said he recalled the data showed the dogs in places like Guam often had health problems.

“I have to go by memory, I haven't reviewed the report it's been a few years. I do sort of remember, not just from the Guam data from two or three of the other projects that I did on Pacific Islands, like American Samoa, one or two others…. There was a pretty high frequency of dogs on the street who were had, you know, who were ill or had infections or parasites or problems that that, you know, clearly detracted from their quality of life,” he said.

He theorized that it could be part of living in a climate that doesn’t have a winter season when parasites and infections spread less.

After the surveyors finished collecting the information on the dogs, the estimates were put together in a neat report.

“We look for statistical relationships between the dogs, the number of dogs that we do see, and various things that might predict that like, how many people what the density of people is, or whether it's close to the shore, or inland, or whether it's in a rural area, or a village or, you know, on an on all of those different things,” Boone said.

“We fine-tuned that relationship for Guam, and then we just sort of extrapolated it across the rest of the island as an approximation of how many dogs we thought there would be.”

“I think the answer we got was, it passed the sniff test,” he added.

The baseline survey revealed in 2014 there were some 24,500 total street dogs. It also showed that most, about 19,000 street dogs, had owners. The report also estimated there were some 36,500 dogs who weren’t roaming free but living it up with their humans at home, for a total dog estimate of 61,000.

The 2014 survey estimated that there were about 39 dogs to 100 human residents on Guam. 

“The true number is probably somewhere in that ballpark,” Boone said. “I'm just saying all of this to let anybody know who's interested in the details, that we know that there are more sophisticated ways to go about it. We just didn't have the time or the money or the resources to do it that way on Guam. So maybe someday in the future.”

Boone said that the 2014 estimates are still reasonable estimates now, in 2021, unless there was some sort of significant change in the community which could impact the dog population. ◉

Next week, I’ll have a story about one of my favorite boonie dog enterprise.

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Thank you to Dr. John Boone for sharing his expertise. If you’re curious about what he’s working on now, visit dccatcount.org 

While Guam works on the dog population here, there’s been a rising problem with outdoor cats in the states.

“The dogs on the street are not such a big issue anymore in the United States but outdoor cats still very much are,” Boone said. “They're controversial because some people try to feed them and help them and other people want to get rid of them because they don't like them or because they are concerned about the birds and other animals that they eat.”

He also said the methods they’re deploying on the DC Cat Count project could be used for roaming dog counts sometime in the future.