One Health and Public Health Implications of Sterilization-Based Management in Free-Roaming Dogs and Cats
A special issue of Animals (ISSN 2076-2615). This special issue belongs to the section "Companion Animals".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 10 July 2026 | Viewed by 8
Special Issue Editors
Interests: stray animal; trap–neuter–return; free-roaming cat management
Interests: toxicology; risk assessment; environmental health; One Health
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
This Special Issue invites research and reviews on the sterilization-centered management of free-roaming dogs and cats (e.g., TNR/CNR) within a One Health and public-health framework. We welcome contributions that quantify population-level outcomes, animal welfare and sentinel health indicators, and public-health interfaces (zoonoses, AMR, environmental health).
Potential topics include the following:
- Program coverage, continuity, and spatial design; evaluation frameworks linking effort to measurable outcomes (incidence, densities, welfare metrics);
- Epidemiology at the human–animal–environment interface: zoonotic risks, AMR sentinels, and community health indicators;
- Welfare assessment pre/post-intervention, perioperative safety, field anesthesia/analgesia, and pain/stress biomarkers;
- Implementation science and governance: regulatory coherence, municipal practice, stakeholder engagement, and cost-effectiveness;
- Methods and measurement: modelling, GIS, monitoring dashboards, molecular diagnostics, and data standards.
We especially encourage interdisciplinary research and policy-relevant studies from urban, peri-urban, rural, and insular settings. Purely lethal control studies without a One Health/public-health analytical component fall outside the scope of this Special Issue.
We look forward to receiving your contributions.
Dr. María del Mar Travieso-Aja
Prof. Dr. Octavio Pérez Luzardo
Guest Editors
Manuscript Submission Information
Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.
Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Animals is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.
Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.
Keywords
- One Health
- one welfare
- dogs
- cats
- human–animal interactions
- free-roaming animal-related population management
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