Imagine a country where the majority (75-80%) of the population is impoverished. Imagine an island culture which is primarily Hindu, a karma culture, and mystics. Imagine a corrupt government.

Here the most of the dogs run free, regardless of ownership. The cultural beliefs, poverty, and lack of education cause the inhabitants to not control/maintain healthy dogs or dog populations.

This is more than a simple vaccination issue. Yes vaccinating and culling will solve the immediate problem, but the greater issues are the government policies, cultural ideals and lack of education.

The reason this is a good idea is because culling or killing dogs has never worked anywhere in the world. Never. And there is no reason to think it will be any different in Bali. The World Health Organization states that the only known way to stop a rabies epidemic is to vaccinate at least 70% of the dogs.

Vaccinating dogs is also the least expensive way to stop the epidemic. Treating people who have been bitten by a dog costs many hundreds of dollars and a vaccination costs less than $3.00.

The more vaccinated dogs there are in Bali the sooner the rabies epidemic will end.

Several options have not been attempted. The only option taken has been to kill dogs and vaccinate some minimal percent of owned dogs whose owners brought them to a central vaccination point. Actually culling of dogs in Bali is exactly the wrong approach to stop a rabies epidemic and the government has had recommendations since the beginning of the outbreak in 2008 by WHO, CDC and other international rabies experts as to why culling does not work to stop rabies. The only way to stop rabies is to vaccinate 70% of all dogs with a good vaccine. Most of the dogs that have been vaccinated in Bali are no longer protected because they were vaccinated with an inferior quality nerve tissue vaccine with an immunity of only 3 months. So the claimed 170,000 dogs is really probably under 20 or 30,000 with any lasting immunity.

The only dogs that should be culled are dogs that have rabies, or unvaccinated dogs that have been bitten by rabid dogs. Vaccinated dogs act as a ring barrier to rabies. They protect our environment. If they are bitten, they will not succumb to the disease. Now that many areas have had dogs inhumanely and indiscriminately killed with strychnine (which is banned in most of the world) we are wide open to a rabid dog entering our villages and biting people and other dogs. In Flores they beat 300,000 dogs to death in a 3 year period and they still have rabies. The only difference is in Flores they actually had enough vaccines to protect the population of people. Many of those who have died is because of lack of information disseminated about rabies wound care and the importance of prophylaxis and also from lack of vaccines.