dogs are becoming the most destructive predator
***cats get a break, usually cats are bashed at the world's worst predator... for birds anyway"RIO DE JANEIRO — High above this Brazilian city, in a jungle blanketing a mountain, the turtles were out and the scene was hopeful.
Scientists were reintroducing 15 mud-caked tortoises to this urban forest where they had once been plentiful. Children were running around. People were oohing and aahing. A stern-looking security guard briefly appeared to smile.
But not government biologist Katyucha Silva. She was thinking about dogs.
What would they do to these turtles? What were they doing to Brazil?
It’s a question more researchers are beginning to ask in a country where there are more dogs than children — and where dogs are quickly becoming the most destructive predator. They’re invading nature preserves and national parks. They’re forming packs, some 15 dogs strong, and are hunting wild prey. They’ve muscled out native predators such as foxes and big cats in nature preserves, outnumbering pumas 25 to 1 and ocelots 85 to 1.
Every year, they become still more plentiful, spreading diseases, disrupting natural environments, goosing scientists who set up elaborate camera systems to photograph wild animals, only to come away with pictures of curious canines.
“It’s a difficult thing for people to hear,” said Isadora Lessa, a Rio de Janeiro biologist who wrote her doctoral dissertation on domestic dogs causing environmental mayhem. “They love dogs too much.”
How the dog became one of the world’s most harmful invasive mammalian predators is as much a global story as a Brazilian one. Over the last century, as the human population exploded, so did the dog population, growing to an estimated 1 billion.
That has been great for people — and even better for dogs — but less so for nature, according to a growing body of academic research implicating canines, particularly the free-roaming ones, in environmental destruction.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/the-dog-is-one-of-the-worlds-most-destructive-mammals-brazil-proves-it/2019/08/19/c37a1250-a8da-11e9-8733-48c87235f396_story.html
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animal control. But, compared to areas of Brazil and India, this is hardly comparable. That headline takes a very real issue of considerable magnitude and fails to put it in the proper context, given Brazil is nowhere in that headline. They are talking about Brazil, not the US nor even more than highly focal areas of Mexico and Latin America.
There is no argument, though that the most damage done on earth by any predator is HUMAN.
I have a thing about headlines that are at best overly inclusive... 
Although no doubt they exist and are predators very dangerous to the natural food chain. But we do have a very serious problem with abandoned dogs and cats. I can't remember the statistic they gave at the shelter we got our dogs but something like 7 dogs and cats are born for every human in the US... thats a lot of homeless pets. 