I've been in Trinidad and Cuba where house cats AND dogs run loose everywhere, and I liked it. It made life a lot more interesting. Now, in Trinidad, for example, there are a lot of smallish hounds that you see everywhere...the Trinidadians call them "pot hounds"...and they are the typical street dog. There are thousands of them running loose, and they are not dangerous...they have worked out their own sort of doggy society and relate mostly to each other rather than to the people. There are also larger and more dangerous dogs kept as guard dogs on various walled properties...but they do NOT roam around on the loose, they stay behind their owners' walls. There are a smattering of cats as well, and they must stay quite alert to avoid getting caught and eaten by the pot hounds.

It's noisy at night, but you get used to that soon enough...you have no choice! ;-) After the first three nights of exhaustion I could sleep through any amount of barking and howling.

I find the easygoing attitude of those southern places far better than the tightass mentality of North Americans, who have to have a frikkin' rule for EVERYTHING. We try to make life perfect here with a million laws, but we don't succeed...we just increase everyone's general stress level and people get weirder (and more spoiled and bored) as time goes by.