David Newall of Romanian Animal Welfare Coalition (RAWC) puts forward the case for neutering, education and … street cleaning

You may assume that, speaking on behalf of an animal welfare organisation, I’m bound to take the ‘softy’ route and condemn legislation permitting municipalities to kill street dogs en masse. And you’d be right. Because the ‘softy’ route is not only the most humane but also the most effective approach to controlling and reducing a street dog population. Here’s why:

Mass killing

We’re not denying there’s a problem. There are thousands of dogs on the streets of Bucharest and Dogs Trust research conducted last year showed that 65% of Romanians consider street dogs to be the number one problem in their local area. The dogs have short, difficult lives and are prone to injury and disease. We don’t want to see them on the streets any more than the local community do.

But rounding them up and killing them en masse isn’t a magic wand to make the dogs disappear. When an area is cleared of dogs, others from surrounding neighbourhoods will simply move in, use the newly available resources and continue to breed.

One female street dog can produce up to eight puppies a year. So if she is lucky enough to live for five years, she could have produced around 40 more street dogs. If you have 500 female dogs on the street, in five years they could produce 20,000 puppies. And then they will start having puppies!

Mass killing is a fruitless, inhumane, ineffective task and certainly didn’t work in the seven years that Bucharest permitted it – street dog numbers did not decline.

If I can’t appeal to your heart strings, how about your purse strings? Aside from the fact that mass killing does not work, it’s also incredibly expensive. According to the ASPA euthanasia costs €60/dog (that includes catching the dog, accommodation for seven days and cremation). The estimated street dog population for Bucharest is 50,000 dogs, so mass killing would cost authorities €3 million (and still the street dog problem wouldn’t be solved).

The better way

It took a long time for the dog population of Romania to reach this stage, so a solution cannot be found overnight. But there is hope. Dog Population Management (DPM) programmes take a long-term approach but are proven to be effective. There are countless examples across the world where situations far bleaker than in Bucharest have been enormously improved after DPM activity: a reduction in the number of dogs and biting incidents.

DPM involves taking an organised, methodical approach. Firstly you need to understand where all the dogs are coming from. In one country it might be ‘latch key’ dogs left to roam and breed in the streets while their owners are at work. In other countries it might be a case of unwanted dogs being abandoned in the streets, others being genuinely lost or being born and bred on the street.

The charity GIA’s figures show that in 2010 approximately 250 dogs (puppies and adults) were abandoned at 10 vet practices (out of a total of 250) in Bucharest. This is a much lower number compared to the number of total dogs abandoned in parks, markets, subway and RATB stations, fields, woods, etc.

There are eight steps to a successful DPM and all need to be employed for the programme to work:

Legislation - a framework so everyone is following the same course. If one sector neuters its dogs and the neighbouring sector does not, the programme will not work.

Census - Nobody knows how many pet dogs or street dogs there are in Romania. In order to resources to best use we need to have a full picture of the scale of the problem.

Registration and identification – We need to know if the dogs on the street are owned and left to wander, have been abandoned or have never had owners. By making microchipping mandatory we can link dogs to owners and hold them accountable in cases of neglect or abandonment.

Neutering - This is the part where some readers may wince. But neutering not only prevents unwanted puppies, it can prevent some cancers and even improve your dog’s behaviour by making him less territorial or aggressive. By incentivising owners to have their dogs neutered and by conducting a methodical approach to neutering the dogs living on the streets it won’t take long for the burgeoning dog population to stop growing. The average street dog lives only three and a half years. The cost for neutering Bucharest’s street dogs would come to around €942,000, compared to the killing programme’s €3 million.

Education – This is actually the most important part. Authorities should educate both children and adults about the benefits of neutering their pet, understanding its behaviour and making them aware that there simply is no short term solution to the problem.

Adoption – There are far more street dogs than people looking to own a dog. But by encouraging potential new owners to consider rehoming a rescue dog or puppy before approaching a breeder or puppy farm even more dogs will be taken from the streets.

Cleaner streets – Dogs will stay in an area as long as there are resources to sustain them and will travel up to 7km in a day in search of food. Resources should be limited by increasing rubbish collection frequency, discouraging citizens from littering and improving catering waste management.

Euthanasia – You may be surprised to see euthanasia of dogs being suggested by an animal welfare organisation. Very importantly, euthanasia is not the same as mass killing. Far from it. The word comes from the Greek word meaning ‘good death’. This is not the mass shooting or poisoning or clubbing with shovels that we often hear about as a means to control street dogs. The fact of life is that in some cases where facilities for rehabilitation do not exist and street dogs are not healthy and happy, but affected by disease, aggression or serious behavioural problems, euthanasia is a sad but realistic part of a responsible dog population management programme.

This programme has already worked in Romania. In 2003 there were an estimated 4800 street dogs in the Oradea and Bihor area. After just seven years and 18,000 dogs neutered the street dog population dropped by 90 per cent to just 512. An incredible number of approximately 216,000 unwanted puppies have been prevented.

I know the topic of street dogs is very hot at the moment and I appreciate the opportunity of putting forward the case for a positive alternative to mass killing. If you are interested in finding out more or show your support for DPM contact the Romanian Animal Welfare Coalition: Raluca Simion or David Newall.

More resources:

UK National Stray Dog Survey 2010

UK Dogs Trust Stray Dog Survey Figures 1997 – 2010

Nicolae Ceausescu suddenly realises that he will be blamed for all of Romania's problems until the end of time

We come in peace.

Whatever side of the barricades you find yourself on in the the Bucharest stray dog debate, can we suggest that we all decide to agree on the fact that the stray dog problem – like so many others for which he gets the blame in contemporary Romania – has nothing whatsoever to do with Nicolae Ceausescu.

Time and again the same old story gets rolled out for the benefit of all (especially foreigners who know no different). It goes something like this:

The problem of stray dogs dates from the time of Nicolae Ceausescu, when houses were destroyed and replaced by blocks. Dog owners were reluctant to take their animals into their apartments, and so they abandoned them on the streets of the capital, where they bred.

The story is false on almost every level.

First of all, while thousands of houses were destroyed during the 1970s and 1980s, and their inhabitants then moved into apartments, large numbers of those people who moved in to Bucharest’s new blocks during those years came to the city from elsewhere in Romania, often the countryside. What’s more, by all accounts the stray dog situation was – while not perfect – certainly kept under control by the communist regime, which often resorted to killing strays. (There is is also the fact that food was hard to come by and there was often nothing left to throw the dogs).

Secondly however – and most pertinently – unless you believe the conspiracy theorists Nicolae Ceausescu was shot on Christmas Day, 1989. That’s 21 years ago and counting.

The average life-span of the average dog is 13 years.

You go away and do the maths and then come back and tell us that it is all Ceausescu’s fault.

Well, not quite dogs in parliament, but today in Romania’s lower house a vote on the never-ending matter of Romania’s stray dogs should see local councils once again have the power to deal with the stray dog problem as they – and they alone – see fit. This will include the right to kill them. (A law in 2007 made the killing of strays illegal).

The sponsor of the law is Vasile Gherasim, an MP from the ruling PDL (our regular reader, Mrs. Trellis of North Wales, will be aware of our views on the PDL). Yet as Gherasim quite succinctly and brilliantly puts it ‘Stray dogs are a national problem. The situation is now out of control and has become a priority.’ Good luck to him.

If passed the law will oblige all local councils to round up all stray dogs. These will be kept in pounds at council expense until adopted or killed. All female dogs – including dogs which are owned – will be sterilized. Only those female dogs kept by registered breeders will be exempt.

As expected, the dogs-before-people brigade are up in arms. (Or paws?) Though they appear to agree that there is a problem, they continue to insist that sterilisation is the answer. They want the dogs caught, sterilised and then released back on to the streets of Romania’s cities.

Why do they not realise that this still means we will have to deal with dogs on the streets?

And that is all we care about.

We do not necessarily want these dogs dead. We simply want them off the streets. We would be more than happy to see them all put in a pound and kept there until they die a natural death.

This issue is not about killing dogs, it is about getting them off the streets, where – in Bucharest alone – last year they bit 13,200 people, of whom 2,700 were children. Oh, and in January they killed a woman.

Further Reading:

A Facebook campaign of people who do not live in Romania, but think Romania’s streets are better places with dogs

A British organisation that wants Romania’s dogs kept on Romania’s streets

Somebody else who doesn’t live in Romania but thinks dogs should be free to bite people (in Romania, of course)

And if you have ever wondered what happens to stray dogs in Britain (and more than 100,000 are caught each year), read this.

That’s right, they are put down if they are not claimed. So why should Romania be any different?

To lose one dog might be considered a misfortune.

To lose two just looks like carelessness…

Translation: BIG REWARD, BOTH DOGS LOST

We read this yesterday with much enthusiasm: Bucharest City Council has pledged to change the law so that all stray dogs it captures and sterilizes will no longer be returned to the city’s streets.

We take our hats off to the prefect of Bucharest, Mihai Cristian Atanasoaei, who said he supports “immediate, firm action [on the dog issue] even though it might be unpopular.” He said that more than 10,000 people have been bitten by strays since November.

We have been here too long though to get our hopes up too high, so we are not holding our breath. At least the issue is back on the agenda though, a year or so after Bucharest Mayor Sorin Oprescu had publicly stated that the issue was not a priority.

It is, and always has been.

Let’s now hope that Oprescu and the five sector mayors he has co-opted onto his anti-dog team now show backbone. Remember: Traian Basescu – when mayor of Bucharest – began a campaign to kill all of the city’s dogs in 2001. He backed down at the first whiff of bad publicity, however, revealing the spineless nature of leadership and obedience to blondes that he has since taken with him to the Romanian president’s office.

As for all you misguided animal lovers out there, a question: if the council does clear the streets of dogs without resorting to killing them (under the law it cannot kill them: it will need to put them up in kennels or such like), will you still complain?

Our guess is you will, for some of you simply want Bucharest’s streets full of dogs.