On March 1 and 2, a two-day workshop was held for central and local level institutions for the humane and sustainable management of the dog population, organized by FOUR PAWS International and the Animal Rights Foundation.

During this workshop, colleagues from FOUR PAWS have shared their experiences from more than 20 years of work in Eastern Europe on dog population management and stray dog treatment. They have shown with scientific and statistical data that the killing of dogs, as a measure to reduce their number, in addition to being inhumane, is also ineffective, is not at all sustainable and has an extremely high cost.

FOUR PAWS has also demonstrated successful cases of sustainable and humane reduction of the dog population in several municipalities of Bulgaria and Romania. Humane methods are possible and improve the situation with stray dogs even faster than killing or building shelters to put all the dogs in.

We are very pleased that many officials from both the central and municipal levels were participants in this workshop, and we very much hope that they will get the best experiences from this workshop and learn from the mistakes of other countries, so that the population of dogs in Kosovo is managed in the most effective way possible, always by respecting animal welfare. Our organization will be close and will support the municipalities with all our capacities to assess the population of stray dogs and reduce the number of dogs on the streets, always focusing on the sources of the increase of their number on the street.

We are extremely grateful to the colleagues from FOUR PAWS who have taken time out of their busy schedules to come to Kosovo to share their experiences in dog population management. This is not the first time that FOUR PAWS is committed to animals in Kosovo, since now thanks to FOUR PAWS we have a success story like BEAR SANCTUARY Prishtina, which has saved all the restaurant bears in Kosovo (and recently also the lion Gjoni), offering them a dignified life, suitable for their species.