I still suspect why stray animals exist isn’t always due to bad ownership but also cultural attitudes and circumstantial misfortune. It’s as if you live in the countryside where your cats and dogs roam, you may want to stop them but can’t because not only are the resources lacking but also too inaccessible. (Some people don’t castrate their pets for the same reason whilst others think that makes them less efficient or something.)
It does make sense why stray dogs persist in the countryside. Even if not all of them are necessarily strays in the expected sense of the word, they’re likelier to stray due to open spaces and also because sometimes there’s little their owners can do about it. Same with cats. Though the degree of straying varies depending on the individual’s socialisation and ecological niche. It’s likelier for farm/compound cats and dogs to be semi-stray.
This also gets complicated by social attitudes like say assuming said animal’s dirty so it often gets excluded, then roam to an extent (if in gardens and farms). So when it comes to stray animals, it’s not just ownership practises but also circumstances that can sometimes make it harder to keep them from roaming.
fynm 