Now that is an achievement !
Superb !
The Kingdom Of Bhutan Becomes The First Country In The World To Achieve 100% Dog Sterilization & Vaccination
The Kingdom of Bhutan has become the first country in the world to declare that its entire street dog population is fully sterilized and vaccinated following years of investment in a humane dog management program with global animal charity Humane Society International (HSI).
At the formal closing ceremony of the National Dog Population Management and Rabies Control Project in the capital Thimphu, presided over by Bhutan’s Prime Minister, Dr. Lotay Tshering, the Royal Government of Bhutan announced this historic achievement for animal welfare and human health.
At the ceremony, Prime Minister Tshering presented HSI with a plaque in recognition of what he called HSI’s ‘consistent and unwavering support’ towards Bhutan’s street dog welfare success from the beginning in 2009 until its closure – thereby honoring a decade and a half of intensive, targeted spay/neuter work and community engagement initiatives carried out by Bhutan in partnership with HSI.
Since its inception, the project has successfully sterilized and vaccinated more than 150,000 street dogs and micro-chipped 32,000 pet dogs.
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Back in 2005 I worked with Slavica (Serbian) to set up ‘Serbian Animals Voice’ in order to be a voice, and campaign for much better treatment of stray dogs and cats in Serbia. From the start it was difficult as we were up against a government which viewed endless killing as the only way to ‘control’ stray numbers.
This is an utterly wrong way to view stray animal management and instead we fought to have the government / regional authority ‘killing money’ redirected into covering costs for stray sterilisations, vaccinations and genera health check ups. Anyone with anything between their ears will agree that sterilised animals cannot produce more young; and that was the basis on which we fought. Their ‘final solution’ of just continually killing and doing nothing else does not reduce numbers as new animal young are being born on the streets all the time. A catch, neuter and re release scheme after vaccinations and a good health check is the only way forward to reduce stray numbers.
Sadly the Serbian government just ignored our proposals and continued with their policy of simply killing anything on the streets that they could. Killing simply creates a void in different areas into which strays will wander; looking for food and probably more dogs to reproduce with. If they are sick and have illness or disease, then they always have the chance by moving to a new area of taking ‘that’ illness into an area in which stray dogs may not have suffered from before.
Health checks, sterilisations and vaccinations against disease is the all round solution to stray dog / cat management. Killing is simply a short term ‘fix’ which may show a reduction in numbers for a few weeks; but with un-sterilised strays reproducing all the time we soon see a situation where ‘local mass killing’ returns stray numbers to what they were before, or even higher.
Serbia needs to learn stray dog management from Bhutan.
Thus to see this superb news from Bhutan is amazing – mega big well done to them for seeking and taking the right advice and way forward with stray animal management.
You can see all of our Serbian work by visiting the old site at
serbiananimalsvoice.com
Well done Bhutan; Serbia dragging years behind as always.
Regards Mark
World Animals Voice 