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Municipalities, shelters, vets still struggling to solve problem of stray dogs

Jul 28, 2017

A few dozen dogs lounged in the shade or by the doors of wooden hutches at the Pristina Animal Shelter. They gathered around anyone who entered the pen, nudging at newcomers’ hands.

A tiny puppy wandered across the dirt between the pens.

            “Look at her. She’s crazy,”said Mentor Gashi, director of the Pristina animal shelter.

Smiling, he pointed at the enclosure and rattled off instructions. Fiona, the puppy, ignored him and walked into another pen.Gashi motioned towards a concrete garage.

            “So people can come and wash their car for bag of food,” Gashi said.

The shelter relies on private donations from supporters on Facebook and international contributions. But relying on donations is not sustainable, Gashi said.

“Worrying about the food every day, if tomorrow will be any donation or not, you never know. Usually help comes, but it’s nothing sustainable. It’s just this idea that you don’t know. Many good people help but it’s just not enough. We do the best with minimum we have,” Gashi said.

Sadik Heta, director of animal health and welfare at the food and veterinarian agency, said the stray animal population in Kosovo is estimated to be between 100,000 and 150,000 in 2016. Dog shelters sometimes struggle to stay open because of lack of funding. Each municipality is responsible for taking care of its own stray dog population.

The agency is working on a document that would allocate funding from the government to each municipality to deal with the stray dog population and create a set of standardized guidelines. While the specifics of the strategy document have not been worked out yet, the agency plans to distribute funding in January 2018, Heta said. Many municipalities do not have funds or plans in place to manage their stray dog populations.

Municipalities used to hire hunters to shoot a large number of stray dogs as a means of population control. Heta said this practice was discouraged by the Food and Veterinary agency, and there have been no new cases since 2015, except for isolated incidents in which a few stray dogs that attacked people were killed. The last documented incidence of a dog killings in Pristina was in 2011.

The municipality of Podujeva contracted hunters to shoot dogs in April of this year. Podujeva municipality officials said a few dogs were killed to control disease.

Blendi Bejdoni, veterinarian and StrayCoCo project manager, said CNVR (catch, neuter , vaccinate, release) is the best method for regulating the stray dog population. StrayCoCo is an international organization that works for the animal welfare and humanely management of stray dog populations inKosovo and Albania.

Helen Wormser, president of StrayCoCo, said the clinic in Nagavac treated 3,506 dogs between January 2015 and May 2017, reducing the stray dog population in Gjakova city and the Rahovec region.

CNVR reduces the population because a new generation of dogs cannot be born, Bejdoni explained. And shelters can only have a small effect on the population, since dogs are adopted one at a time and there are simply too many dogs to adopt.

StrayCoCo usually does not support dog shelters because they can be inhumane.

The municipality of Gracanica also supports a clinic that performs the CNVR method. Vladica Trajkovic, director of public services and emergencies for the municipality of Gracanica, said many dogs are dumped from other municipalities in Gracanica that do not have a way of dealing with their stray dog populations.

The shelter receives about 1,200 euros a month from the municipality.

Heta said he inspected the shelter after receiving complaints of poor conditions from animal rights activists. A report issued by the Food and Veterinary Agency on July 10 concluded the conditions at the shelter were unsatisfactory.

The shelter is overcrowded and needs more funding, but otherwise the dogs have adequate food and water, Trajkovic said.

 “So Sadik Heta and some other people from the agency, they showed up without warning to check the conditions of the shelter, and they saw that the dogs had enough food and enough water and weren’t hungry. The only thing that they remarked was that the shelter had capacity for less dogs than they were keeping and the vet there wasn’t writing what kind of vaccines the dogs were getting,” Trajkovic said through a translator.

Heta said the agency recommended either closing the shelter or setting a deadline of one month for the shelter to hire a vet and improve the conditions of the shelter.

Veterinarian Kreshnik Vejsa said adoption is not common in Kosovo because many people cannot afford to take care of a dog. It costs 90 euros to spay a female dog at his clinic and 50 euros to neuter a male. Vaccines are an additional 10 euros.

And surgery can cost 200 to 400 euros if a dog gets hurt or gets hit by a car, Vejsa said.

Vejsa said attitudes about stray dogs vary from person to person.

 “There are some people who try to help the dogs. They take them, they vaccinate them and they try to find a family or a place where they can send them. But there are also others who ignore them, who don’t help them. And there are different citizens who maltreat them and by beating them or stuff like that just to make them leave from their neighborhood,” Vejsa said through a translator.

Kosovars are trained to be scared of dogs, thinking they are dangerous, Bejdoni said. Even pet owners worry that their dogs will fight with strays when they walk them. StrayCoCo is working to change that mentality with education about responsible dog ownership in schools in Gjakovacity and the Rahovec region.

But not everyone shares a fear of street dogs.

Irena Cahani owns three dogs, one she found through Vejsa and two she took from the street.

Her son took their other dog, Oscar, out one night and came back to tell his mother about a puppy he found on the street. When she came back, it was sitting at the entrance to her apartment building.

It was November, much too cold outside for a dog, so she took it in. She wanted to give the black and white puppy up for adoption, but decided she couldn’t when she saw her son playing with it. So Mia stayed.

“They are faithful animals. I can say that they are stress release. When you come in after the work, and you enter the house, and they are jumping on you, you have to play with them. You have to give them love and they give you back love,”Cahani said.

Still, Cahani said she doesn’t feel secure walking her dogs around Pristina with so many strays because they could bother her dogs.

Gashi’s private shelter is a different way to deal with the stray dog population other than through the government, but paying for it is not always easy.

The shelter does not have a car, so Gashi has to use a taxi. This prevents him from going to restaurants to collect food. Moving several dogs in a taxi to the vet is difficult. The shelter only has 2700 euros out of the 3500 euros it still needs for a car.

Gashi said about eleven dogs get adopted a month. While expenses can vary, salaries for two workers are 500 euro a month, rent is 450, transportation 100, medical 100, food 200. The shelter currently has about 57 dogs, but that can fluctuate from 55 to 70 dogs.

Seven tan and gray puppies gathered at the gate of a small pen while Gashi counted that they were all there. They were dumped through the fence one night, a common occurrence for the shelter. Gashi has contemplated making anyone who dumps a dog pay for it, but he hasn’t yet.

“If you bring the dogs, of course, you have to pay something. But I am very soft. I feel bad to ask people to pay. This is what we were thinking from the beginning, if you bring a puppy you have to support it monthly for 25 euros, minimum. This is nature of this shelter. It’s not a business you know. How can you charge someone who dumped ten puppies?,” Gashi asked.

Gashi created the shelter in 2014 after he closed another shelter near Prizren when it ran out of money. This time, he started the Pristina shelter on his own. Now, he has two employees and a volunteer.

Gashi has ways of keeping this shelter funded, one of which is sponsoring. Amelia, a tiny black puppy, was recently sponsored, one of only three dogs with sponsors at the shelter. It costs five euros a month to sponsor a dog, and the sponsor can come and see it any time before it is adopted, Gashi said.

And a dog can be adopted by internationals or Kosovars.

Gashi said the number of Kosovars and internationals who adopt is about the same. Gashi has noticed an increase in Kosovars who want to.

The shelter keeps dogs for six to eight months. If a dog does not get adopted in that time, the shelter releases it, but that does not happen very often, Gashi added.

Gashi and his assistant, Slavisa Stojanovic, discussed the names of the puppies that got adopted yesterday, writing their records in a notebook to the sound of cars buzzing by. Dog leashes hung on the pitted cement wall in the small office. Gashi said he only recently started taking records.

A dog wailed outside. The dogs fight sometimes, Gashi said. Stojanovic left to break them up. Gashi lounged on the tan couch he sleeps on sometimes when a skinny tan dog wandered into the office.

“Maybe she wants food,” he said.

The dog walked over to where he was sitting on the couch and nudged his leg. He drew the dog up into his lap and stroked her head.

“They are lovely creatures, this is why I’m doing it. They know something, I don’t know. They know how to thank. They don’t speak but honestly they know that you help. Look at her.”

(Laura Fitzgerald is a reporting intern at KosovaLive this summer in cooperation with Miami University in the United States).

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