As is usual - that is NOT the entire truth!
HERE:
09 MAR 11 / 08:53:49
Romania Feels Hounded By Stray Dog Problem
Parliament is to debate a new law allowing the authorities to kill stray dogs, as numbers rocket in the capital to as many as 250,000.
Marian Chiriac Bucharest
Romania's parliament is to debate a law this week that will allow authorities to put down any stray dogs that are not adopted two weeks after being taken off the streets to a public shelter.
The law aims also to force dog owners to become more responsible for their pets, as well as to legalise foreign adoption of stray dogs.
"Romania has to adress the longstanding unsolved problem of stray dogs and our proposal is efficient and humane. The situation is out of control and has become a priority," MP Cornel Pieptea, one of the supporters of the law, said.
Animal rights advocates oppose the law, saying the best solution is to neuter and spay stray dogs.
"There is a problem, but sterilisation is the answer. We want the dogs on the street to be caught, neutered and then released," Raluca Simion, from the GIA animal rights organisation, said.
"The authorities should not be allowing dogs to be killed, but should force dog owners to become more responsible for their pets," Simion added.
Bucharest is home to a huge number of stray dogs. Estimates of the semi-feral population range anywhere from 40,000 to 250,000 dogs.
Officials say that 13,200 people, including 2,500 children, were bitten by dogs last year alone, though those numbers include bites by both strays and pets. One woman died in January after being mauled by a pack of dogs.
A law passed in 2008 bans killing strays. The dog problem, meanwhile, has continued to grow as efforts to spay and neuter the dogs and return them to the streets prove inefficient.
There is severe overcrowding at dog pounds, which lack the funding needed to build and run more shelters.
The problem of strays in Romania worsened in the late 1980s, when former communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu ordered city officials to demolish a large proportion of the houses in Bucharest in order to build new tower blocks and boulevards.
Many dog owners simply abandoned their pets when they were forced to accept re-housing in flats, and the animals ran wild and multiplied.
So tell me: WHAT ARE THEY TO DO, without the proper funding, and shelters!?
If you don't want them to kill them - THEN YOU need to step up to the plate, and help FINANCE, and fix this mess.
Otherwise, holding them for 2 weeks before euthanization is sure better than what they do in CALIFORNIA!
