Wild dogs can be a difficulty for you, either on your work property or if their are populations near your home, and you might not know how to deal with them, and whether you’d be able to employ lethal or non-lethal methods. Luckily, there are a variety of ways that you can deal with wild dogs, but their effectiveness will vary from situation to situation, since they are wild animals and you cannot be entirely confident of how they will react to any given method. Also, unless you have read up on and are an expert on the laws surrounding dealing with wild dogs in your area, it’s always best to consult a local wild dog control officer, or do some extra research on the laws in your area, since this article does not cover the laws surrounding the methods, but rather the methods themselves – the laws would take a whole other article! With that out of the way, however, we can now continue to display a variety of lethal and non-lethal ways to work with or even get rid of wild dogs.
Shooting
This is a somewhat straight-forward method which you may have already thought of, and it is a lethal method which will effectively remove any wild dogs from your property, so that they cannot continue to be a nuisance. If you are considering this method, make sure that you are able to carry a firearm and have the correct licensing, and attempt to shoot the animals in the most safe and humane way possible – you don’t want to prolong any suffering endured by the dog, or potentially put other innocent animals (or even humans) in harm’s way. Make sure that there are no passersby who could be harmed, and only attempt this method if you know that you can shoot the animal in a quick way which is not going to cause it to live on injured or to die after a non-lethal injury (i.e. of bleeding out) since this is needlessly inhumane treatment of the dog.
Fencing
“Fencing might be the best non-lethal method of controlling and dealing with wild dogs, especially if you have livestock to protect,” says James Connery, a dog trainer at Writinity and DraftBeyond, “but it can be costly if you have large areas of land which you want to exclude wild dogs from, and it could get more expensive if you invest in the (more effective) electrified fencing. Farmers may view this as their best option, but it will take a lot of maintenance and checking, so it isn’t a ‘quick fix’, and it won’t stop one hundred percent of wild dogs. Also, if you have any wild dogs trapped within the fencing, they will need to be taken care of with another method, since they will start hunting any animals within the fence for food, which is the opposite of what you want.”
Traps
Traps aren’t usually meant to kill wild dogs, but they do offer the option of catching dogs stuck inside a fenced area and transporting them away after being anaesthetised, or simply euthanised (the most common method of doing this is usually shooting). “Traps can be used on their own to varying levels of effectiveness,” Timothy Riggs, a veterinarian at, states, “but you will have to keep track of where they are, and check them regularly. You also need a plan to deal with trapped animals, since you haven’t eliminated the problem just by trapping it, and starving it (leaving it in the trap) is just inhumane and wrong, and could even be illegal in certain areas depending on the laws surrounding wild dogs.” Use another method on this list to deal with the wild dogs once you have them caught, but this can be a good way to ward wild dogs away from an area and also to deal with a population if you do want to use lethal methods.
Conclusion
There are many different ways to deal with wild dogs, which is good since laws can vary from area to area and your own personal views may mean that you need another option which isn’t just shooting them on sight. Even for those who do want to remove wild dog populations from their land lethally, you may need to use traps in order to actually deal with the animals, since hunting them all down would be taxing on your time and resources. In short, a combination of these methods (and others) is often the best way to deal with wild dogs, and you should always consider the law and your individual situation.
