4,000 out of 64,000 stray dogs left on the Capital’s streets, almost 30,000 put down and 23,000 adopted

Bucharest City Hall have seized 51,2000 stray dogs from the streets since October 2013 (mostly in districts 2 and 6), with about 4,000 still remaining out of the total estimated number of 64,000. According to Razvan Bancescu, the project chief of the Authority for Animals monitoring and Protection (ASPA), 23,000 have been adopted, 2,000 are presently in the municipalities’ shelters, and the rest of them have been put down to sleep or died of natural causes (about 30,000).

Bancescu also said that the lowest number of persons bitten by dogs in 30 years has been registered in December 2014. Compared to the last three years, 780 were bitten by dogs in September 2012, 475 in September 2013 and 107 in December 2014. At the same time, in the last month of the past year only 89 persons have been bitten by stray dogs.

“From the start of the program, 17,600 complaints have been solved and 51,200 stray dogs have been captures. 23,000 dogs have been adopted with 6,400 adoption processes being already checked. At the same time, 24 illegal shelters have been identified,” Bancescu said.

In his view, the municipality met his target assumed in December 2013 after the a 4-year-old boy have been bitten to death by stray dogs in Bucharest, meaning to drop by 80 percent the number of stray dogs in the Capital by March 2015.