A Capital For Dogs

From Yahoo:
"Bosnia's capital becomes safe haven for stray dogs"

It's past midnight and a van stops on a hilly Sarajevo street. The side door slides open quietly and four dogs jump out. The van makes a U-turn and disappears into the dark. A few moments later, animal protection activist Amela Turalic is awoken by a phone call, and a female voice informs her that another "delivery" has just been made. The city that was the scene of some of the worst warfare during the Balkans wars has unexpectedly become a safe haven — for stray dogs facing death elsewhere in the country. Bosnia passed a law nearly four years ago banning the killing of strays, alarmed at a sharp rise in canine slaughter as wild dogs proliferated on Bosnian streets. But people ignored the law, largely because authorities failed to provide alternatives such as sterilization.

Animal rights activists such as Turalic believe the government should have trained vets to neuter the animals and built shelters so they could be adopted or released to live out their lives without reproducing. Since March, Sarajevo has become the only city in Bosnia where the law is respected — thanks to a new city-funded dog shelter run by Turalic that performs sterilizations. It means that people around the country have taken to collecting strays and dumping them on the streets of Sarajevo, confident that Turalic and her team of animal lovers will pick them up and provide care.

"We have a perfect law," said Turalic. The problem, she said is that, "the law was adopted almost overnight without anybody providing the conditions for its implementation." Since the country remains deeply divided along ethnic lines, different parts of Bosnia deal with the problem of strays in different ways. That's because the 1992-95 war between Bosnia's three groups — Bosniaks, Serbs and Croats — ended with a peace agreement that divided Bosnia into two semi-autonomous regions, linked by a weak central government. It's an arrangement that allows some local governments to pass their own dog-killing laws that contradict the nationwide ban. "Dogs and also cats are treated as communal waste here," said Bogdana Mijic, from the animal protection group Noa, based in Banja Luka, the administrative capital of the nation's Bosnian Serb region. In Sarajevo, where animal activists are the loudest, it took Turalic's teams three months to get the problem of strays under control last summer with the shelter and sterilizations. "But then we started noticing 'new faces' on the streets daily and people started telling us about overnight deliveries," she said. It has turned Sarajevo into a stray dog haven. "Let them come," Turalic said. "People do this with best intentions."

^ I think Sarajevo is great in doing this for the dogs. They are not only taking in their own strays, but also those from all around Bosnia that otherwise would be killed. This just makes me want to visit the city even more. I wanted to go when we were in Croatia, Montenegro and Mostar, Bosnia but we didn't have time. I hope this program for stray dogs can be expanded to the rest of the country (whether they are Serbs, Muslims or Croats) because in the end it helps everyone - including the dogs. ^

http://news.yahoo.com/bosnias-capital-becomes-safe-haven-stray-dogs-