Interesting. Very interesting.
News today to warm the heart of all but the Dogs First Taliban Tendency: new legislation to deal with Bucharest’s stray dog problem has been sent to parliament for approval.
In brief, the new proposal is this: dogs will be caught, taken to a shelter, and if they are not then adopted within a week they will be put down. Simple. This will in turn allow more dogs to be caught and taken to shelters and – if not adopted – killed. Right now all of the city’s dog shelters are full, and even agressive dogs cannot be caught as handlers have nowhere to take them.
This is not the first time of course that a grand proposal to solve, once and for all, Bucharest’s stray dog problems has been announced. This time though, it looks to be just a little better thought through, with many of the loopholes that have kept these beasts on the streets until now removed.
The most important is that nobody will be allowed to adopt more than two stray dogs unless they can prove that they have the space and the finance to look after them properly. Until now it had been easy for people to ‘adopt’ tens of dogs, simply letting them loose again on the city’s streets. This has now become impossible. Here’s hoping that this will be the beginning of the end for Bucharest’s stray dogs.
In the first three months of this year, more than 2000 people were bitten in Bucharest by stray dogs.
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Yeah, right, kill them all, but start with the politicians!
How come that an NGO in Oradea was able to decrease the number of stray dogs from 4,000 to 400 through neutering, while the Bucharest City Hall has refused, in 2008, a similar offer from Vier Pfoten? (http://www.romanialibera.ro/actualitate/eveniment/oradea-primul-oras-liber-de-maidanezi-184901.html)
Still 400 too many in Oradea, and how long did that take? How does neutering get dogs of the streets in the immediate future? I am not interested in a long term approach, and judging by the way public opinion now favours extermination, neither are most people in Bucharest. Death it is.
I hear there’s a plan to get rid of the English too. The PRM have put something forward.
Stray dogs are indeed a problem in Bucharest, but what about these mangy, stray Englishmen? That’s what I’d call a Gordian Knot…
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