Dog cruelty has a long history in Romania. Popular belief is that the only way to reduce the street dog population is to kill them en masse. The street dogs of Romania are hated, poisoned, beaten, stabbed, shot, run over by cars, burned, and dumped in pits to starve to death. Some who are killed have their ears cut off by people who are able to turn them in for “rewards”. Hundreds of thousands of innocent dogs condemned to death every year, their only crime is being born. Animal advocates say the pointless deaths will never cease, as long as Romanian authorities fail to address the cause of the stray problem, and fight only the effects.
Dog owners have little responsibility for their pets. Many are not compelled to identify, register, or spay and neuter them. After a 4-year-old boy has died and his 6-year-old brother was injured after they were attacked by a pack of stray dogs outside a park in Romania, now the Parliment take the decision to kill all the stray dogs arround the country.
Authorities say 1,100 people were bitten in Bucharest by stray dogs in the first four months of 2013. The stray problem in Romania began in the late 1980s. Before the communist regime of Dictator Nicolai Ceausescu, most Romanians worked on farms with their companion animals. But Ceausescu’s policies changed agricultural Romania into an urban society complete with overcrowding and food shortages.
When communism took hold, many rural families were forced to work in urban areas and weren’t allowed to take their pets with them into the apartments where they lived. Thousands of dogs were left to fend for themselves in the countryside.
Since Ceausescu’s execution in 1989, the dog population has grown into the millions. A law has been in place to formally prohibit the killing of strays since 2008. But the law only prevented large scale killings, such as those seen when strays were killed en masse in the streets. In 2001 the then-mayor of Bucharest launched a campaign that led to the extermination of at least 100,000 stray dogs in the capital alone. However, a few years later the streets were again littered with live and dead dogs.
It was impossible to drive from the Hungarian border to Romania without seeing scores of stray dogs foraging for food and without seeing several dead bodies on the road, according to SOS Dogs. The World Health Organization’s “Guidelines for Dog Population Management” (Geneva 1990) and various other academic studies show that killing dogs is ineffective. Despite mass extermination campaigns by misguided municipalities the street dog population grows. Without a formal sterilization plan, the number of dogs has increased exponentially.
Animal advocates say the atmosphere of hysteria and intolerance was crafted by the media to undermine sterilization programs. There has been a harsh campaign against stray dogs in the Romanian media. Newspapers and television are flooded with images of dangerous packs of stray dogs roaming the streets with evil intent.
The mayor of the country’s capital Bucharest stated that the quickest way of getting rid of the strays was mass slaughter, and soon enough other cities followed in suit. For over 20 years the dogs have been chased, captured and killed in numerous cruel and painful ways. They have been shot, poisoned, hung, burnt to death or crammed into small kennels to die of hunger and thirst.
The most common way of putting dogs to sleep in municipal dog pounds has been to inject lethal fluid straight into the dog’s heart without any anaesthesia or pain relief. Because the dogs are killed at a great pace, the injections may stray into the dog’s lung, for example, which obviously causes the dog to die a delayed and very agonizing death.
Today, after more than 20 years of systematic dog slaughter, we can conclude that there are still as many stray dogs in Romania, if not more. The govern’s decision is really out of any human reasons. We expect that International community will act immediately to solve this terrible problem and find a civil solution.