The Netherlands has gained the enviable reputation of being a country without stray dogs. Molly Quell, a US writer based in the country, looks at the history of the Dutch and their dogs

If you visit the Netherlands, you’ll see a lot of dogs. They sit in cafés and restaurants with their owners, shop alongside them in stores and travel by train and bus. The Dutch, famous for their biking culture, also cart their dogs along on their bikes. But none of those dogs will be strays.

Every year, only 5,000 dogs end up in Dutch shelters. Romania, which has a similar population size to the Netherlands, has more than 600,000 stray dogs, PETA estimates. And the overwhelming majority of dogs in Dutch shelters were never stray or abandoned; most Dutch dogs end up in shelters because their owner passed away or the family was no longer able to care for them.

“Two hundred years ago, this was not the case,” says Isabelle Sternheim, of the Animal Platform Foundation. A dog researcher and animal welfare policy adviser, Sternheim authored a major study on stray dogs in the Netherlands in 2012. This study was the first to document that the Netherlands was free of what animal rescue organisations refer to as “free-roaming dogs”.

Sternheim’s research found that in 1800, nearly every household in the Netherlands had a dog. The upper classes owned pedigree dogs for sport and as pets, and these animals were well groomed, cared for and fed. The poorer echelons of society had mongrels solely to guard the house, pull carts and work as hunting dogs.

At this time there were few official arrangements for dog keeping, and most dogs roamed free. When their owners had no more use for them, they would be put out on to the streets, where the stray dog population inevitably increased. Frequent outbreaks of rabies finally prompted huge action to reduce the number of strays. In 1875, the government culled large swathes of street dogs and introduced a dog tax, which aimed to reduce the number of dogs.

Both measures had the opposite effect: culling temporarily reduced the number of dogs in certain areas, but without the current methods of sterilisation, more dogs just moved in to replace those who were killed. Most people were unable to or unwilling to pay the dog tax and opted to abandon their dogs to avoid paying it.

Symbol of wealth and friendship

Meanwhile, from an economic point of view, things were going well. During this period, Dutch colonial holdings brought riches to the Netherlands, political unrest seen in the previous decade subsided and dogs increasingly became status symbols. Spending money on pedigree breeds and lavishing care and attention on grooming and care showed off wealth, and this trend trickled down the social classes. As the wealthy treated their pets well, the less wealthy sought to emulate that. Higher living standards meant that families could grow to encompass dogs as pets.

The improved treatment of dogs is shown by the organisations and legislation that abounded at the time and there is a clear shift in the Netherlands’ relationship between man and dog, from “master and slave” in the 1800s to “friend and friend” today. The first animal protection organisation in the Netherlands was founded in 1864 and animal abuse was made a crime in 1886. Today, animal abuse carries a punishment of up to three years in prison and a fine of up to €19,500. Those convicted are often barred from owning animals in the future.

Bring in the love

The dogs that take up such a central place in the Netherlands today come from a variety of places. Estimates from the Animal Platform Foundation show that around 12,600 dogs were imported to the Netherlands in 2016, the latest year that figures are available. Dutch shelters received about 5,000 stray dogs during the same time period. Meanwhile, 150,000 dogs are sold by breeders every year in the country.

Myra Houtgraaf, a freelance designer who lives in Amsterdam, rescued her dog Nova from Greece via an organisation that brings Greek streets to the Netherlands for adoption. “I looked at Dutch shelters but they mostly had adult dogs and I really wanted a puppy,” she says. The organisation she got her dog from only works with dogs younger than a year old.

The situation was similar for Iris Chen, who describes herself as “obsessed with dogs”. A manager at Adobe, she found her dog via Facebook from an Italian woman living in Belgium. “She found Grillo in a box with his brother by the side of the road,” she says.

Iris and her husband had also applied to adopt a dog from a Dutch shelter but were rejected. “They said we had a non-ideal working situation because I worked full-time and my husband was a freelancer,” she says.

“The dogs don’t know they come from abroad,” says Jeannette van Asperen, who runs organisation Huize Zwerfhond, or Stray Dog House, in the village of Oosterwolde in the Netherlands.

Huize Zwerfhond gets its dogs from Spain and Greece, and is working with a shelter in Bosnia and Herzegovina. She finds homes in the Netherlands for around 70 dogs a year. “We have good shelters in the Netherlands. That’s not true in other places,” she says. All Dutch shelters have heating, running water, professional staff and sufficient financial resources.

Renee Walker from Paws Patas says that most of the dogs sent to the Netherlands adhere to strict rules for the importation of animals. “They undergo testing, if they are older than six months of age they are spayed or neutered, they have a final exit check before they leave,” she says. Paws Patas, located in southern Spain, rehomes around 250 dogs and cats per year in Spain, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom and is one of around 200 such organisations operating in the Netherlands.

“Not everything is perfect,” Isabelle, the author of the study, cautions. Dutch shelters still take in around 5,000 dogs a year. Most of those animals come from owners who have died or who are no longer able to care for the animal.

Trouby is one of those exceptions. He was purchased online as a puppy from a breeder but was taken into a shelter when he was nine months old because his owners thought he had too much energy. He was one of two dogs in the shelter to be born in the Netherlands when the author of this article brought him home, telling her how funny it was that an immigrant from the US was rescuing a born-and-bred Dutch dog.