save the dogs in Romania

Dog cruelty has a long history in Romania.The  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.

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.

There is a lot of discussions about the people in Romania who do horrible things to the animals and those who through their silence accept these actions. The latter is unfortunately true for the majority in Romania and they also contribute to the misery the animals have to endure!!!