Costa Rica’s stray dog population stems from a deeply rooted culture of allowing dogs to roam freely, combined with historically low rates of sterilization and veterinary care. While the country has made significant progress in recent years, the problem built up over decades and still plays out visibly on streets, beaches, and rural roads across the country.
Free-Roaming Culture and Loose Ownership
The single biggest driver is cultural. For generations, many Costa Rican households treated dogs as semi-outdoor animals rather than indoor pets. Dogs were fed at home but allowed to wander neighborhoods during the day or night. This “permissive attitude toward free-roaming dogs,” as researchers at Frontiers in Veterinary Science describe it, blurred the line between owned and stray. A dog roaming the streets might have a home to return to, or it might not. Many reproduced freely along the way.
A nationwide study attempted to count how many owned dogs were loose on the streets at any given time. Researchers estimated roughly 43,000 owned dogs were roaming freely during morning hours and about 27,000 at night. Those are just the dogs with homes. The total number of truly unowned strays has never been formally counted, which itself says something about the scale of the problem. Researchers noted that one way to gauge the unowned population is to check how many free-roaming dogs lack collars, and the proportion is substantial.
The good news is that attitudes are shifting. The same research team observed that Costa Rica is evolving “relatively quickly from a culture where dogs are mostly permitted to roam and receive relatively little veterinary care to a culture of ‘homed’ pets.” But cultural change takes time, and the stray population reflects habits that accumulated over many years.
What “Zaguate” Means
Costa Ricans call their mixed-breed strays “zaguates,” a word borrowed from the Nahuatl language. The original term, “zahuatl,” literally translates to “mange,” and it was used to describe dogs of no particular breed living on the streets, often visibly sick. The word carried a derogatory edge for a long time, reinforcing the idea that street dogs were less valuable than purebreds.
That perception has softened considerably. Today, “zaguate” is used with affection, and organizations like Territorio de Zaguates (Land of the Strays) have turned it into a point of pride. Still, the legacy of viewing mixed-breed dogs as disposable contributed to decades of low adoption rates and casual abandonment. When a dog is seen as interchangeable with the next stray that wanders by, there’s less motivation to invest in spaying, vaccinating, or keeping it contained.
Sterilization Gaps
Uncontrolled breeding is the engine that keeps the stray population growing. When pet owners don’t sterilize their dogs and those dogs roam freely, litters are inevitable. The puppies that aren’t claimed join the street population, and the cycle repeats. Costa Rica’s warm climate means dogs can survive outdoors year-round, so there’s no seasonal die-off the way colder countries experience. Food sources like garbage, restaurant scraps, and well-meaning people leaving out bowls all help sustain large populations of free-roaming animals.
Sterilization campaigns have expanded in recent years, driven largely by nonprofits and some government coordination. But reaching rural and low-income communities, where the highest concentrations of unsterilized dogs tend to be, remains a logistical challenge in a country with mountainous terrain and scattered villages.
Laws Exist, but Enforcement Is Thin
Costa Rica passed its Animal Welfare Act (Law 9458), which reformed previous legislation to establish real penalties for animal abuse, neglect, and abandonment. The law allows for both fines and imprisonment. On paper, it’s one of the stronger animal welfare laws in Central America.
In practice, enforcement has been slow. Between August 2017 and February 2022, authorities received 994 official complaints nationwide for violations of the animal welfare law. Of those, only 24 involved abandonment of a domestic animal. The first criminal conviction under the law didn’t happen until 2020, when a man was sentenced to one year in prison for abusing a dog. A handful of other convictions followed: a man who amputated a dog’s leg with a machete received three months in prison and five years’ probation, and a couple was sentenced to two years for causing a dog’s death.
These cases made headlines, but they represent a tiny fraction of the actual mistreatment and abandonment happening across the country. With fewer than 1,000 complaints over nearly five years in a nation of five million people, the law clearly isn’t deterring most offenders. Many people in rural areas may not even know the law exists.
Government Agencies and Shelter Strain
SENASA, Costa Rica’s national animal health service, oversees animal welfare at the government level. In recent years, SENASA has partnered with shelters to handle animals seized from neglect and abuse cases. The criminal investigation police (OIJ) have also begun seizing animals found during raids. This is progress, but it has created enormous pressure on the shelter system.
One partner organization, AHPPA, saw its intake from government seizures jump from around 4,000 animals in 2016 to over 13,200 in 2023. That more than threefold increase reflects better enforcement, but it also means shelters are absorbing far more animals than they can easily rehome. The system is catching more cases of abuse and neglect, yet the supply of dogs keeps outpacing the capacity to care for them.
Nonprofits Carrying the Weight
Much of the hands-on rescue work falls to private organizations. Territorio de Zaguates, the country’s most famous dog sanctuary, has rescued over 26,700 dogs in its 15-year history and facilitated more than 14,200 adoptions. It currently houses about 1,800 dogs waiting for families. Those numbers are remarkable for a single nonprofit, but they also illustrate how enormous the need is. If one sanctuary alone has nearly 2,000 dogs on site at any given time, the countrywide population of strays and surrendered animals is orders of magnitude larger.
Smaller rescue groups operate across the country, running sterilization clinics, foster networks, and adoption events. International adoption programs send some Costa Rican dogs to homes in the United States and Canada. These efforts make a real difference at the individual level, but they’re fighting against a pipeline of new strays that won’t slow down without broader changes in sterilization access and cultural norms around pet ownership.
Health Risks for Dogs and People
Large populations of free-roaming dogs create public health concerns beyond the welfare of the animals themselves. A study of dogs in Costa Rican recreational parks found that about 29% carried ticks and roughly 35% had fleas. When researchers tested those parasites, 30% of tick samples and 32% of flea samples carried bacteria in the Rickettsia family, which can cause serious illness in both dogs and humans. About 10% of dogs tested showed antibodies indicating past exposure, with rates as high as 22% in the Guanacaste province.
These bacteria are transmitted through tick and flea bites, meaning people who interact with stray dogs or share public spaces with them face some risk of exposure. Costa Rica eliminated rabies in dogs years ago, which is a major success, but tick-borne diseases remain an underrecognized concern tied directly to the free-roaming dog population.
Why the Problem Persists
There’s no single villain in this story. Costa Rica is a middle-income country with a strong environmental ethic (it’s famous for protecting its rainforests and wildlife), and public sympathy for stray dogs is genuine and growing. The problem persists because of overlapping factors that reinforce each other: a cultural legacy of loose pet ownership, insufficient access to affordable sterilization, animal welfare laws that are rarely enforced, and a shelter system that’s overwhelmed by the volume of animals coming in. Each piece would need to improve simultaneously to make a lasting dent. The trajectory is moving in the right direction, with younger generations increasingly treating dogs as indoor family members, but the stray population visible on the streets today reflects habits and gaps that built up over decades.