The news of 8-year-old boy being attacked by stray dogs is really worrying and quite tragic for the child who got injured.
This case reaffirms once again, with particular emphasis on how seriously the “registration, castration / sterilisation and vaccination programs for stray and owned dogs” should be taken in Kosovo.
Due to the absence of appropriate state (at the moment) closures and re-education facilities and entities of aggressive dogs (be it stray or with owners), projects dealing with stray dogs in Kosovo, allow the euthanasia of aggressive dogs.
Dogs classified as dangerous by their nature (qualified by professionals who understand the dog’s psychology and veterinarians in some cases) are usually put into sleep, with veterinary, painless procedures for the animal; because, for the time being, there is no other institutional solution in this regard (except for adoptions by a person or organisation that takes legal responsibility for the aggressive dog – the aggressive dogs cannot be released on the streets again!).
However, we hope that the projects and tenders issued by the Food and Veterinary Agency of Kosovo, in the future will be given to subjects or entities with a proper mandate and appropriate professionalism to make awareness campaigns in order to inform and teach citizens and children in schools: how to and how NOT to behave in surroundings of stray animals, especially for the aggressive ones;
The state also needs to inform citizens: how to report a potentially aggressive dog on the streets, to the officials of the Public Services Directory (or veterinary clinics contracted for the CNVR by the state) for each respective municipality in order for them to treat the dog with castration and vaccination – and in cases of their confirmed aggressiveness, apply euthanasia.
Very often people call dogs as aggressive as they harass and persecute them every day. Unfortunately, children are in some cases victims of the aggression of their parents or adults who have exercised abuse or maltreatment on stray dogs; this because they were never taught how to deal with dogs and animals in general.
Very soon, in the case of the construction of the temporary care centres (TCC) in the Municipality of Prishtina and Prizren, aggressive dogs will have the opportunity (if worked in this regard) to go through several stages of re-education to reduce their aggressiveness and become potential for adoption; and of course, not released agressive dogs again on the streets, like it will be done for other dogs who are going to be treated in the TCCs.
We will make an open appeal in the near future, first to local institutions (municipalities) to invest as quickly as possible in a Temporary Care Center (TCC), as foreseen in the Administrative Instruction 04/2017, so that all dogs will be treated properly and with a high work monitoring for each dog separately.
In addition, we will invite foreign organisations to be part of the supportive programmes of re-education and rehabilitation mechanisms and projects of dangerous/aggressive stray animals in Kosovo.
It is a fact that dogs get educated very easily, in contrary to our institutions though.
We hope that our institutions will not make ineffective decisions (because the correct reasons of the attack are yet unclear) by generalising all the dogs, just because they are not able to hire one expert (for each municipality) to identify aggressive dogs, so that the dogs could be relocated from the streets, in which they presumably can pose a danger to citizens, as we can see from the last case.