My opinion

Stray dogs

I don’t know about the others, but when I think about my native town my heart trembles of joy. And, good God, nice were those times, ’cause my town used to be, before the revolution, clean, nice, big, young and peacefully. Now I’m living in Romania’s capital city, city that used to be labeled as creme de la creme of all towns. How is Bucharest now: dirty, busy, polluted, gray, full of cat/dog shit, dangerous, large, disorderly, corrupt and the negative epithets list might continue. Same time, Bucharest can be brag for its large, big parks, almost every park is having a small pond, brag for its beautiful buildings, old ones with Paris fragrance, and the new ones of glass and concrete, brag for the large shopping malls, exact copies of those from the "civilized" west, museums, theatres, historical monuments, vestiges of the past, etc.
Bucharest’s visiting-card is now speckled with stray dogs, collateral (and innocent) victims of expansion and modernization of the city made by communists in ’70-’80. Their presence began a problem after the revolution (in ’89) due to their uncontrolled bridding, that results into forming packs of dogs, which in same cases, used to attack, similar to their wild relatives, the wolfs. The troubles case by them to people, the danger of being hurted, even killed (like it happened with the unfortunate Japanese), the dirt, noise, diseases, forced the people to come with a solution for protection of the population, of the human being, which, however much the idea is to blame, is consider to be superior to the dog, on the biological scale. If, for start, the easiest solution has been put in practice, the one of collecting all the stray dogs from the streets and then killing them (this solution has been used by the communists authorities too), the NGOs, the animal protection organizations react promptly (as it was expected form their part, in a democratic country, this is their duty too), now a new "modern" solution had to be found, to sterilize and castrate them, the animals being then set free. But, this solution had a big disadvantage: the cost of the surgical operation. Then, a new attempt has been done of finding a solution, using the knowledge from the western countries, using or copying one of the solution used in these countries: collecting the dogs, sorting them, the ill ones being put to death, the health one being disinfected and then hosted for 14 days, in this time these "souls" being placed for adoption. After this period of 14 days, if the dog is not adopted, the is put to death.
Putting an animal to death is not something nice, but we have to do something in order to leave civilized. I hope the euthanasia word to be correctly understood, as a procedure that consist in killing by as much as painless methods. The animals protectors argue that euthanasia, the process of putting the stray dog to the death would be a cruel act, painful, a opinion, of course, that they have all the right to express. I myself consider that the method of hosting the dogs for 14 days is the optimal solution for the nowadays Romania. Unfortunately, the decreasing of the days number from 14 to 5 I think is a mistake that should be corrected.
The animal protectors should look into german’s country, or into the french’s, or into the belgian’s, etc, to see that there is no stray dogs on their streets. The large amount of money addressed for the castration and the inefficiency of the method (due to the small number of surged dogs, and to the reduce number of veterinary cabinets that performed these surgeries) raised a question whether this money are a waste for the national budget, budget that all persons contribute to, including a lot of people that are not agree with you. If you, animal protectors want to help, adopt one of the dogs hosted in the shelters (and keep it inside your yard/house, don’t release it back into the street), raise founds for helping these animals. The hostility that you display, the insulting arguments that you utter such as a dog is superior/better than a human being, the animal can sense the bad person, etc, the death threats, these are not the solution for the stray dogs problem. There are people (from my side, including myself) that loves to play with a dog/cat, to pat it, to talk to it, enjoy the company of an animal, but this doesn’t mean that we accept to be byted (in 90% of the cases I know, the dogs weren’t provoked), to be threated, chased, or menaced by the presence of a stray dogs pack on a street that we have to walk on. If a grown-up man thinks twice before passing that street, taking a risk, think about a child, that has to go to school, or an old person has to go shopping on the local market place.
Those persons that demonstrate on Koln, when Basescu visited the city, and displayed awestruck pictures of killed dogs, should be forced to watch pictures of mutilate people, badly injured or worst, killed by dog beasts. They have to be forcedly transported to the city morgue to see the lifeless bodies of the victims, the one of the Japanese, the ones of the children attacked and killed by the stray dogs near villages, to be present when these bodies are entrust to relatives, and then they might think of the animals they are fighting for.
The solution adopted today in Bucharest (with the statement that it must be reversed to 14 days for hosting the dogs) I consider to be the best, in my opinion.

Webmaster - 2008-09-26