Duration: 01.2025 - 12.2025
People involved: Laura da Silva
Rabies is a significant public health concern in India, where the highest incidence of human and canine rabies globally is estimated, driven by a large population of free-roaming dogs (FRD). Closing knowledge gaps on dog ecology is required for improving implementation of rabies control strategies, such as mass immunisation of dogs against rabies virus. Understanding the size of dog populations is essential for evaluating the success of strategies aimed at controlling dog populations and rabies. However, many countries fail to achieve this guideline due to high costs, limited resources, lack of expertise, and unclear methodologies. In India, estimating FRD populations is a key objective of the National Action Plan for Rabies Elimination (NAPRE), the plan for elimination of dog-mediated rabies by 2030. The first objective of this project is to characterize the core demographic profiles of FRD populations in India and to estimate FRD populations using different methodologies.
Moreover, the increased accessibility of GPS techniques in recent years has led to a rise in movement studies and published literature on FRD, with many articles across the globe focusing on home range analysis. The collection of GPS data for home range estimation has several limitations, including high costs, resource demands, the need to physically handle dogs, and the potential for device loss. Simpler, less resource-intensive methods may be an acceptable method for approximating home range estimations of FRD. Our project has as a second objective to assess a less resource-intensive alternative for HR estimation through observational enumeration surveys.
