United in their love for canines, an unlikely Albanian and Serb duo have teamed up in Kosovo to run a shelter for abandoned dogs, in a rare example of cooperation in a country still deeply divided along ethnic lines more than two decades after a devastating war.
Distrust still undercuts relations between the Albanian and Serb communities, without a common language and with ethnic tensions never far from the surface.
However, the lingering distrust has done little to separate Mentor Hoxha, 55, the Albanian founder of the Pristina Dog Shelter, and Slavisa Stojanovic, his 57-year-old Serb counterpart.
Photo: AFP
Their operation provides shelter to about 40 dogs in a handful of kennels sitting near farmland in Gracanica, a Serb-majority town near Kosovo’s capital, Pristina.
“We are connected by our love of dogs,” Hoxha said.
The two have helped more than 1,000 canines since they joined forces in 2010.
Typically, the dogs are vaccinated and sterilized before being released back into the streets, while puppies and other more vulnerable canines remain at the shelter.
Hoxha and Stojanovic place about 80 dogs a year with families across western Europe.
Animal shelters are rare in the nation, where stray dogs have long been a scourge in cities and villages.
The numbers soared after the conflict pitting Serb forces against Albanian guerrillas in the late 1990s, with abandoned pets pouring into the streets as the internecine fighting displaced their owners.
To combat the problem, Kosovo authorities offered bounties to hunters to gun them down — until a public outcry spurred on by celebrities including French actress Brigitte Bardot stopped the culling.
However, abandoned canines still roam Kosovo’s streets, lounging near traffic roundabouts and sleeping in public parks.
Following a string of dog attacks on children in 2017, the Kosovo government released 1.3 million euros (US$1.5 million) for a four-year sterilization program.
However, an estimated 10,000 canines have yet to be neutered, leaving a persistent population of dogs on the streets.
With few willing to help the strays, Hoxha and Stojanovic channeled their love of dogs into creating one of the few shelters working with street dogs — and outsiders marveled over their ability to overcome their ethnic differences.
“I find it strange when people ask about us,” Hoxha said. “It’s completely normal for people to socialize. The war ended 20 years ago.”
An estimated 13,000 people were killed in the 1998-1999 war, which ended after a three-month-long NATO bombing campaign forced Belgrade to withdraw its troops and leave the governance of the region to the UN.
Kosovo unilaterally declared independence from Serbia in 2008, with about 100 countries recognizing it as a sovereign state — with the exception of Serbia and its allies, Russia and China.
Hoxha suggested starting the shelter after a chance meeting with Stojanovic in the street, discovering that they shared a passion for helping the abandoned dogs in their area.
“Mentor and I are alike in heart and soul, and in our love of animals,” Stojanovic said.
The shelter relies mostly on donations and an army of volunteers, with the lion’s share of their funds helping to cover the costs of vaccinations and sterilizations.
“Our project has had a lot of impact on the situation, and the awareness and attitude of society towards abandoned dogs — primarily the importance of sterilization,” Hoxha said.
Kosovo filmmaker and animal rights advocate Hana Noka said that more needs to be done in the country to raise awareness about the issue of strays.
“There are stray dogs that live in horrific conditions and left alone on the streets all year round,” Noka said. “Most passers-by don’t even look at them.”
Despite the hardships and perennial lack of funding, Stojanovic said that he has no regrets about dedicating himself to stray dogs.
“If I started again, I wouldn’t change anything. I feel at home with animals. I’m with the dogs nonstop,” he said.
“They show great love — they just don’t talk,” he added.
PHISHING: The con might appear convincing, as the scam e-mails can coincide with genuine messages from Apple saying you have run out of storage For a while you have been getting messages from Apple saying “your iCloud storage is full.” They say you have exceeded your storage plan, so documents are no longer being backed up, and photos you take are not being uploaded. You have been resisting Apple’s efforts to get you to pay a minimum of ￡0.99 (US$1.33) a month for more storage, but it seems that you cannot keep putting off the inevitable: You have received an e-mail which says your iCloud account has been blocked, and your photos and videos would be deleted very soon. To keep them you need
For two decades, researchers observed members of the Ngogo chimpanzee group of Kibale National Park in Uganda spend their days eating fruits and leaves, resting, traveling and grooming in their tropical rainforest abode, but this stable community then fractured and descended into years of deadly violence. The researchers are now describing the first clearly documented example of a group of wild chimpanzees splitting into two separate factions, with one launching a series of coordinated attacks against the other. Adult males and infants were targeted, with 28 deaths. “Biting, pounding the victim with their hands, dragging them, kicking them — mostly adult males,
Filipino farmers like Romeo Wagayan have been left with little choice but to let their vegetables rot in the field rather than sell them at a loss, as rising oil prices linked to the Iran war drive up the cost of harvesting, labor and transport. “There’s nothing we can do,” said Wagayan, a 57-year old vegetable farmer in the northern Philippine province of Benguet. “If we harvest it, our losses only increase because of labor, transportation and packing costs. We don’t earn anything from it. That’s why we decided not to harvest at all,” he said. Soaring costs caused by the Middle East
The Israeli military has demolished entire villages as part of its invasion of south Lebanon, rigging homes with explosives and razing them to the ground in massive remote detonations. The Guardian reviewed three videos posted by the Israeli military and on social media, which showed Israel carrying out mass detonations in the villages of Taybeh, Naqoura and Deir Seryan along the Israel-Lebanon border. Lebanese media has reported more mass detonations in other border villages, but satellite imagery was not readily available to verify these claims. The demolitions came after Israeli Minister of Defense Israel Katz called for the destruction of
RSS