The cremation of the dead dogs

 

The last link in the money-making process is PROTAN - the company who holds the monopoly in burning animal carcasses [9] and the neutralization of all kind of animal waste [9], and which is the final and common destination of all Romanian stray animals. 

 

According to an article on the Romanian stray dogs business [13], written by Codrut Feher (FNPA) in 2010/2011, the incineration of a 20 kg dog cost 10 EURO (0.5 EURO/kg) at that time (2010/2011) but is probably higher to date.

 

Since most shelters don’t have weight scales and Protan reception documents specify that the quantity column should be filled out by the customer, the weight was eyeballed by the animal control folks, wrote Codrut Feher.

 

And if we take an average weight of 20 kg per dog which is then being eyeballed at 25 kg (or even more), this would mean 1,625,000 kg of dogs to be cremated at a cost of 0,5 euros per kg = 812.500 Euros to be embezzled only with the cremation process.

 

SUMMARY of monies to be spent by the town hall of Bucharest for 65,000 street animals

 

Rounding up of the dogs:    3,211,000 euros

Housing of the dogs:         6,160,700 euros

Euthanasia of the dogs:        733,200 euros

Cremation of the dogs:         812,500 euros

 

TOTAL:                    10,917,400 euros for 65,000 dogs living in Bucharest or 167,96 euros/dog

 

 

and now let's extrapolate this on the entire stray animal population of Romania which the Romanian government estimates at 3 million dogs and intends to reduce by 80%, meaning that 2,400,000 dogs are to be 'eradicated' ('eradication' was the term that they had used during the debate in the Parliament on 10th of September, 2013), if not adopted. claimed or perished before the end of the 14-days-pre-slaughter-period.

 

Given that the Romanian government has implemented very strict adoption rules making adoptions almost impossible, and that shelter workers and managers actively hinder adoptions because adopted dogs make no profit for the companies that run these shelters, and if we would assume that no dog will get adopted but that they will all be killed, it looks as if the Romanian government (in a worst case scenario) was ready to spent - according to our calculation which is based on figures and costs shared by the Romanian government themselves -  an incredible 403,104,000 euros of public money on a stray animal population control strategy that the WHO (World Health Organisation) considers to be ineffective!

 

The World Health Organization’s “Guidelines for Dog Population Management” (Geneva 1990) and various other academic studies show that killing dogs does not stop the problem but only offers a temporary “solution”. This was (and is) also true for Romania: despite mass extermination campaigns by misguided municipalities the street dog population grows, and the best examples of both good and bad stray animal population control policies come from their own country:

 

The only towns in Romania that used catch/neuter/release programs were Oradea and Lugoj, and the results are showing!

 

ORADEA had a stray dog population of 4,000 animals in 2006 which had been reduced to 270 animals until 2011 at a cost of 14 euros to spay/neuter one dog.  The program was run and funded by Robert Smith - FPCC/Dog - Project Oradea, UK, in collaboration with the city hall Oradea.

 

LUGOJ had a stray dog population of 2,500 animals in 2008 which had been reduced to 235 animals until 2011 at a cost of 12 euros to spay/neuter one dog. The program was run and funded by the city hall Lugoj in collaboration with the local animal welfare organization, Free Amely.

 

As mentioned before: In 2001, Traian Basescu, the then-mayor of Bucharest - the same 'gentleman' who introduced the Romanian 'Slaughter Law' - launched a campaign that led to the extermination of about 144,000 stray dogs in the capital alone, spending almost 9,000,000 Euros (62 Euros per dog) during the period from 2001-2007. Between 2008-2010, 20,000 dogs have been killed in Constanta spending 1,500,000 Euros (75 Euros per dog). And as we all know both the cities of Bucharest and Constanta are again littered with live and dead dogs...

 

Romania's latest 'stray animal control strategy', their 'eradication program', too, won't be successful.

 

Although there will be significant profits to be made, the net result will be abject failure and the number of animals will not decrease because new puppies will continue to be added to this sad cycle, for the reasons that we will explain below.

 

According to an email received from Dr Carmen Arsene, the President of the National Federation for Animal Protection (FNPA) on the so-called 'norms', the Rules of the Law 258/2013, which will be officially presented at the Romanian Embassy in Vienna on 5th of December, 2013, the 'norms" do now include a provision that ALL owned dogs of Romania must be sterilized within one year, which is - of course - not only very commendable but also the ONLY right thing to do.Unfortunately, in the absence of other provisions, this strategy will not only be unsuccessful, but it will lead to a real disaster for the following reasons:

 

• There are an estimated 5 million owned dogs in Romania (according to FNPA) and it's impossible to sterilize all these dogs within 12 months (416.666 sterilizations per month, or 18.939 per working day) because there are simply not enough veterinarians in Romania, and even less who can do proper sterilizations.

 

• Many veterinarians who cannot do sterilizations will commit to do so anyway, resulting in the death of many female dogs. So happened in Arges (a county near Pitesti) when an unqualified veterinarian hired by the municipality "sterilized" all female dogs (about 500) .... the dogs died days later in agony on the streets on the consequences of these "sterilizations"Given that the 'norms' do not provide for any financial support to people who can not afford the costs for sterilizations, and to avoid the fine which will be of 2,500 euros for those who will not have sterilized their dogs within one year (the net average salary in Romania being of 350 euros!) many people - especially at the country side where dogs are mostly chained in the garden and used as guard dogs without much "value" - will simply abandon their dogs, like they have always done with dogs that had become useless.

 

• The abandoned dogs that will now be killed after a '14-days-pre-slaughter-period' spend in one of Romania's death camps, at the expense of the tax-payers, will swiftly be replaced by new dogs that are being abandoned because people can not afford the costs for sterilization, and even less the imposed fines of 2,500 euros in case of non-compliance.

 

And there's the corruption, of course...

 

In his brilliant report on the Romanian stray dogs business [13], Codrut Feher explains the "flexibility of the budgets".

 

Cars and related costs

 

According to this report, in Brasov, for example, four rundown old cars, with easy to tamper mileage tracking systems, were each allocated about 350-400 liter of gas per month, which means each car did about 100 km/day.

 

The chief dog-catcher of Brasov even got to buy his own jeep, a Mitubischi L200, for about 30,000 EURO, under the pretext of helping large animals, such as cows, pigs, bears, rhinoceros or giraffes that might have wondered into the public roundabouts build by mayor Scripcaru. Rumor has it that the jeep is used in certain weekends by two local authorities in their hunting trips.

 

Rented lands and buildings

 

Land was rented for the municipality shelters, despite that fact that local authorities had land they could build on. The Brasov municipality paid in 8 years more than 1,500 EURO/month (170,000 EURO in total) to the owners of a former swine farm that was in really bad condition and it also invested in modernizing the farm... All of this while it could have built a brand new shelter with 15,000 EURO on a land it owned.

 

Tranquilizers and lethal substances

 

In Brasov also, about 100,000 lei were annually spent on tranquilizers and lethal substances, but nobody ever checked that against the number of dogs reported caught and/or euthanized. These substances were bought illegally (without prescriptions), used illegally (because the dog catchers got lazy and started to catch all dogs with tranquilizers, committing two felonies in one?) and may have even been used or sold as drugs (Vetased, the most used tranquilizer contains ketamine, which is used as a recreational drug and is legally considered a drug since 2010).

 

The business of gathering dogs

 

Several mayors with business “abilities” transformed the local animal control departments into businesses that made money by catching and killing dogs from small towns that didn’t have their own shelters or by catching the dogs in a town without shelter and “hosting” the dogs in a different city, tens of km away. The corrupt mayors became so addicted to these profits that they imposed quotas on their dog catchers: the Brasov dog catchers hunted in 4-5 counties, bringing over 120,000 lei to Brasov’s budget. Most of the dogs were exterminated in the Stupini shelter and a small number were handed over to other cities that had shelters.

 

The whole operation was made profitable at the price of torturing the animals and breaking the Romanian animal protection laws. After loading up the dogs and before heading for Brasov, the Brasov dog catchers would be paid per number of dogs for capture, transportation, sheltering and euthanasia.

 

Since they were already paid and everyone saw them leaving with the dogs, nothing (certainly not their conscience) stopped the dog catchers from releasing most of the dogs on their way back to Brasov, to make sure that the problem continues and they are called back to “help”. Any animal lover would be happy to hear that, if they didn’t know that the dogs would be caught again and again, sometimes injured in the process, and would most likely continue to multiply.

 

The counting of the dogs

 

The audit of the activity of the dog catchers was a chimera. Nobody was really counting the dogs. Nobody knew how many dogs actually went through their hands, from capturing through incineration, especially since the documents for PROTAN (the incineration company [9]) were filled out by the dog catchers themselves who approximated the weight of the bodies, filling in numbers with a lot of digits and even decimal points, and tried to make it match the number of dogs they claimed to have caught. It was very easy for them to claim for example they caught 5,000 dogs while in reality they caught half of that number.

 

The dogs that (fictionally) entered the center were also supposed to (fictionally) leave the shelter. On June 25, 2009, according to the official documents, between 131 and 154 dogs were killed in Brasov. A witness and several documents point to the fact that only 90 animals were killed and that those dogs were from Victoria, Fagaras and a few other towns. In November 4, 2009, the Brasov dog catchers captured 46 dogs in Covasna. People from Covasna were told that the dogs were in the Brasov shelter and people from Brasov were told they were in the Covasna shelter, but the dogs were not found in either shelter.

 

On June 1st 2010 the Brasov dog catchers caught 48 dogs in Sangeorgiu de Mures and transported them to the Reghin shelter. The Reghin shelter received and registered only 25 dogs.

 

Another way to make money was to manipulate the adoption numbers, especially the adoptions towards private shelters: adopted dogs were also counted as euthanatized. In 2008 at least 400 dogs were adopted from the Brasov dog catchers by the “Millions of friends” rescue association. In the official documents that number is 0!

 

Finally, another way was to modify the number of deceased dogs, by recording a smaller number than the real one and accordingly increase the number of euthanized dogs. For 2008, the shelter mortality as it resulted from official records was of 79 dogs, meaning a dog died every 4 days. In the first months of 2009, the mortality was of only 23 dogs, meaning a dog did every 8 days. In reality, the number of dogs that died in the shelter is much higher: at least 300-400 in 2008 and at least 150 in 2009. And there were also the dead dogs that were found in the city and which had to be, of course, euthanized. 

 

"Interestingly" even culling dogs can be very profitable. The President is therefore asking the tax payers to fund an expensive, non-evidence based, ineffective practice and we are now facing a slaughter without precedent!

 

 

The Romanian stray animals issue is NOT an "emotional zoological disaster".

It is animal exploitation! Plain and simple.