Members of Romania’s ruling Democratic-Liberal Party (PDL) are currently collecting signatures around Bucharest in order to force a local referendum on the stray dog issue.

No, they don't get a vote. That's because they're dogs

Without going into the whole dog argument again, we do think that a referendum is a good idea, no?

Let the people of Bucharest decide how the problem should be dealt with. If a majority votes to get rid of them by any means, so be it. If the majority of people vote to keep them on the streets, so be it. That’s how democracy works, no?

Whatever your views on the subject, surely nobody could object to a referendum?

Enough is enough.

Fun as it has been, the time has come to close the ‘How many?‘ comments thread which – dead for a while – was reignited last week and which has become the most commented post on this entire sorry blog. The comments are now, however, going around in circles somewhat, and very little which is new is now being added.

Thanks to all – regardless of whether you are in the human or animal camp – for their contributions, and rest assured that the issue is almost certainly bound to crop up here (and elsewhere) again.

Before we close the subject, however, there are a few things which have cropped up in this week’s comments which need attention.

First off, it is clear that there is a large number of people in countries outside of Romania who genuinely believe that dogs are being killed every day on the streets of Romania in the most horrible ways imaginable, and that this is government policy. One person even commented that the killings were being carried out ‘in front of children.’

This is of course nonsense. Where these people are getting these ideas from is beyond us – even the propaganda that gets put out by the pro-dog NGOs usually makes it clear that there is no mass dog cull actually taking place. Much threatened, no government has yet had the balls to carry out such a plan. While there are of course cases of individuals brutally injuring or even killing dogs, such stories are isolated and are certainly not unique to Romania.

Secondly, we have come across what can only be called racism in many of the opinions expressed.

Many people who want to ‘save Romania’s dogs’ have freely admitted that dogs are regularly killed all over the world as part of government-sponsored animal control policies, and that this is fine. The insinuation is of course that ‘civilised’ countries can be trusted to humanely put dogs down, whereas those nasty little Romanian picaninnies couldn’t possibly be trusted to do the same.

You will often find the same racism when it comes to mining with cyanide and the Rosia Montana issue. When you point out to opponents of the mine that some of the cleanest, most environmentally friendly countries in the world (New Zealand, for example) use cyanide in gold mining, people will often reply ‘yes, but that’s New Zealand, not Romania. Romanians can’t be trusted with cyanide.’

Sorry to call a spade a spade, but that’s racism.

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.

Here’s a news story for all those people who think feeding Bucharest’s stray dogs is a good idea:

Dogs maul Romanian woman to death

Yep, it’s happened again. (The poor woman mauled to death yesterday was not the first person to be killed by Bucharest’s stray dogs).

So we were wondering: How many people have to die before the rights of the human beings whose city this is become more important than the (non-existent) rights of stray dogs?

Alas, we all know the answer.

Even after this latest death, there are still people insisting that killing the stray dogs is wrong. We cannot make up our minds if they are naive idiots, mentally ill or simply evil.

Links to our previous posts on the issue:

April 2010
February 2010
May 2009

NOTE: Comments on this post are now closed. See why here.