They roam the streets of Bucharest, sad-eyed, scraggly mongrels that shelter in demolition sites, rifle through garbage — and increasingly attack humans. The capital’s massive stray dog population, a legacy of communism and its aftermath, can have lethal consequences: In recent years, a Bucharest woman was killed by a pack of strays, and a Japanese tourist died after a stray severed an artery in his leg. Now, after a four-year-old boy was fatally mauled last week, the city wants to take action.
A controversial plan to capture and kill Bucharest’s tens of thousands of strays, blamed for dozens of attacks every day that need medical treatment, has divided the city. Animal lovers and dog-wary citizens are at such loggerheads that the city has called a referendum next month on whether to go forward.
“We will do what Bucharest’s people want, exactly what they want,” Mayor Sorin Oprescu said last week in announcing the Oct. 6 referendum.
Photo: AFP
However, Oprescu said late on Tuesday night that he will ask City Hall to cancel the referendum after Parliament voted to allow Bucharest’s plan to go ahead.
The 226-23 vote, with 21 abstentions, came in the Chamber of Deputies. The bill must now be signed by the president, then published, before it can become law and allow the dog killing campaign to begin.
The stray dog population of this city of 2 million rose rapidly as the city expanded into once rural areas after communism ended in 1989.
The Matei Bals hospital has treated 9,760 people for dog bites in the first eight months of the year, of which a quarter were children, according to spokesman Catalin Apostolescu.
It was the death of the four-year-old boy playing with his older brother in a park that sparked a new impassioned debate over putting down strays.
A day after the fatal attack, Romanian President Traian Basescu, a vocal supporter of stray dog euthanasia, called on the government of Romanian Prime Minister Victor Ponta to pass a law that would allow for stray dogs to be killed.
“Humans are above dogs,” Ponta said.
Hundreds have demonstrated both for and against the measure and have vowed to continue rallying in coming days. The current law only allows the killing of stray dogs that are sick.
Animal welfare group Vier Pfoten says the city has 40,000 stray dogs, while City Hall claims there are 64,000 strays. No figures are available for the end of the communist era, but Bucharest residents remember the stray population exploding after the Soviet collapse.
Many Bucharest residents simply fear they are being overrun by street mongrels.
“We want a civilized capital, we don’t want a jungle,” said Adina Suiu, a 27-year-old hairdresser. “I will vote for them to be euthanized. I drive a car most of the time, but when I walk around my neighborhood, I am always looking over my shoulder. If we don’t stop them now, we will be taken over by dogs.”
Vier Pfoten counters that the solution is not killing strays, but sterilizing them. The group has sterilized 10,400 dogs in Bucharest since 2001 — but says the problem needs to be tackled on a mass scale that is beyond the capacity of animal welfare groups.
“We sterilize one, and five more are born in the same time,” said Livia Campoeru, a spokeswoman for the organization. “We need mass sterilizations.”
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