We went through all this with Ryan over on GT in the "Colorado" thread. She wanted a database NGA members could use to indicate the disposition of retired dogs, remember?
What would prevent the owner from simply checking the box "adopted" and sending it back to the NGA? Who would verify it actually happened? The new owner? The adoption group? If the owner did it, would you trust them? If the adoption group did it, wouldn't they have to register with the NGA as an official group? Would AR groups do it? If they reported every dog it might blow their stupid "20,000" figures right out of the water. Some of them openly discourage adopters from contacting owners. Most of these groups despise the NGA---what would make them want to work with them and help prove their figures?
What about where the owner gives the dog away directly? I got two of my five pets that way. Who verifies that?
Who monitors all this stuff? The NGA is tiny. I doubt they have even 20 full and part-time employees.
Jay, you and I know that if such a system were in place GPL and Grey2K still wouldn't believe "the numbers." There are still groups publishing "30,000" and "50,000" for crying out loud. Talk about out of touch with reality.
The NGA does not publish whelping figures, it publishes numbers of litters. Included in those, as we've repeated ad nauseum for you, are every stillbirth and puppy mortality. GPL and their ilk simply multiply average litter size, 6.5, times the number of litters, subtract the number of registrations from that and come up with the total of culls not taking into account the fact that puppy mortality even exists or that, as you pointed out, some unregistered dogs are available for adoption. To GPL they're just dead---no questions---all culled. Because of the way they use the figures, those idiots even have the stillborn pups listed as "culled." How stupid is that?
Let's use 2002 for an example. There were 27,142 registrations and 5,205 litters. The litters were actually whelped in 2002, but the registrants could have been born in 2000, 2001 or 2002 because pups are registered at different ages. For the purposes of this example, we'll pretend they were all whelped in 2002. 6.5 times 5,205 is 33,832 whelps, minus 27,142 is 6690, or 19.7% of total whelps. Let's just say greyhound farmers achieved the low end of most puppy mortality estimates of 15%; that leaves 4.7% of the puppies surviving to registration age. 5% of 6690 is 334 dogs. Even in the unlikely event that farmers somehow outperformed the results of every veterinary study of puppy mortality out there and achieved 10% that's still 669 pups.
Considering the margin for error inherent in any estimate, I don't think 300, 400 or even an unlikely 600 dogs change my figures all that much.
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