Our first trip to Romania dates back to August 2001.
The extremely bloody methods adopted by Basescu, former Mayor of Bucharest, now President of Romania, to solve the phenomenon of stray animals have mobilised most of the animalist associations in Europe.
When the country dwellers moved to the city they were forced to abandon their animals on the streets where they have reproduced to soaring rates without control.
80,000 dogs barbarically killed in a single year.
News on the massacre of strays in Romania has forced us to take active part by sending emergency aid.
We have provided surgical instruments, medicines, sanitary material and funds to purchase food.
In January 2003, after a fruitful co-operation with the NATURE association in Bucharest, considering the dramatic conditions that the animals were in, we decided to build a kennel.
We started many campaigns to raise funds; information tables were set up to help disseminate this initiative.
Distance adoption was promoted, thereby giving us the possibility of guaranteeing a daily meal and veterinary care to about 120 dogs and 40 cats in our shelter.
The subscribers supported us with great sensitivity and through the funds raised our association was able to purchase a 3,000 sq.m. piece of land south of Bucharest where kennels have been built. We are now going ahead with the implementation of a veterinary surgery.
We are currently engaged in an extremely important campaign to spay and neuter the strays:
Dogs are taken off the street, spayed or neutered and hosted in our shelter for post-operation care. It is essential and of priority importance to clamp down on the births so as to prevent stray animals from being captured and killed by the town authorities.
At the end of January 2006 the situation in Bucharest again turns into an emergency: Ansa reports of the death of a Japanese man after having been bitten by a stray dog.
Safety measures are immediately taken and the authorities order another wave of extermination: 1,500 dogs killed in only three days.
The serious thing about the whole situation is that the individual citizens felt authorised to step in personally by beating the stray dogs to death and poisoning them.
On Saturday 18 February 2006 the news shows shocking pictures proving yet another massacre in Transilvania where about one hundred strays were shot dead.
We immediately started the adoptions: I travel to Romania on a weekly basis to take care of transporting the dogs, which with the help of Italian volunteers and the structures that have accommodated them, have the opportunity to leave Romania; however, the thought still remains with those that are still on Romanian territory.
Thanks to these adoptions, we will be able to make places available at the kennels in Bucharest and Cernavoda so that other strays can be taken off the streets and given shelter.
We would like to point out that following the events that took place at the end of January 2006, the period for a dog in a town kennel before being exterminated has been reduced from 14 to 3 days only.