An official with Humane Society International says it will conduct the first dog population count in American Samoa in a similar way to how wildlife sampling is undertaken.
John Boone, who is a wildlife biologist by profession, says counting dogs sounds like a simple thing, but it isn't and many villages would not be covered in a full census.
He says his organisation wants to get the best estimate as to the number of dogs using an approach that wildlife biologists use.
"We are using a lot of the same approaches to counting dogs that we might use for counting birds or dolphins or anything else, so it includes some sientific sampling, meaning that we know we can't go everywhere and count everthing but we have a careful method by which we choose the places to go so we can count the animals there and extrapolate the numbers to the entire island."
John Boone of Humane Society International
