Stray Animals in Romania

Romania/Bucharest: 60,000 dogs populate the streets of Bucharest. The stray-dog problem had its origins in the regime of Nicolae Ceausescu, when distressful economic conditions created a multitude of consequences. Struggling to survive, people abandoned their dogs to the streets. Many had to surrender their homes in the country to move nearer to the newly built factories - and there was no room for dogs in the silo dwellings around the plants. The stray animals are still multiplying out of control today, becoming a health hazard for humans due to the disastrous hygienic conditions in the city. They feed on garbage; they are not vaccinated and are believed to transmit disease.

Killing them is not the solution

It was a fateful day for the stray dogs in the early 1990s when the Bucharest city government resolved to kill them off en masse to put an end to the problem. For seven years, the government's dogcatchers collected the animals together and brought them to the slaughterhouse where they were crammed into cages; often, the starving animals would attack each other, and the stronger animals would eat the weakest ones alive



Finally, they were killed in the cruelest of ways - poisoned with strychnine, strangled or beaten to death.

But this pitiless action did nothing to improve the stray-dog problem. The dogs still at large kept on breeding out of control and their number continued to increase.

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