I feel I must take issue with Helen Palmer ('Dog's Life', Letters, 302). Street dogs are often a dreadful nuisance, their yowling and howling late into the night is not conducive to peaceful sleep, especially if they have congregated en masse. My own dogs are evidently equally aggrieved judging by the racket that they make when a street pack comes sniffing at the gate. One can never condone cruelty to dumb animals but lobbing a rock or two is a temporarily effective way to encourage them to desist. Snipping off and whipping out their canine naughty bits seems to me an expensive and ultimately ineffective way of dealing with the problem. When I lived in Cairo, the local municipality used a much more effective solution: once a month or so the armed policed would make a tour of locales with a large street dog population and shoot them all in the head, effectively culling the population and ensuring that residents of the neighbourhood (and their attendant dogs) could sleep soundly. Surely there are more pressing things than the city's street dog population that require time and money?

Andrew Steele,
Handigaon-5