Nicosia Aim For Single Dog Shelter
Nicosia’s six municipalities will shortly be requesting tenders for the management of a dog shelter to cater for all the capital’s stray dogs.
Speaking on behalf of Nicosia Mayor Eleni Mavrou, Senior Nicosia Municipality Inspector Andreas Taliadoros told The Cyprus Weekly:”A holding area that used to belong to an animal welfare organisation was purchased recently and the term of the tenders have been prepared and are awaiting final approval. I expect the request for tenders to be issued soon.”
Under the Dog Law, municipalities must have facilities to keep strays for 15 days before humanely putting them down.
Taliadoros said that the area, which used to belong to the Cyprus Seciety for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (CSP-CA) had been cleared of dead trees and weeds and that trees in the area had been trimmed.
“the holding areas themselves are not in too bad a shape,” the inspector said, adding that the Veterinary Services had approved the site in 2008, before the municipalities began negotiations for its purchase.
“Conditions have to comply with the law and we all want to comply with the law,” he said, adding that the new shelter would replace the facilities currently used by the Nicosia municipalities.
The change cannot come soon enough for some. A reader on Mondat contacted The Cyprus Weekly after becoming distressed by a recent incident involving stray dogs taken off the streets by two Nicosia-district municipalities-Lakatamia and Strovolos.
Visiting Nicosia Dog Shelter to look at dogs with the view of adoping one, the reader was there when staff from the two municipalities brought in 15 dogs.
Most in a terrible state, the dogs had been strays kept at the municipalities for the previous two weeks.
One of the dogs had to be put down almost immediately and another had been put down by Monday Morning.” All the poor creatures were filthy, covered in ticks and fleas and some were so this they were skeletal”, the distressed visitor said.
Like most shelters around Cyprus, Nicosia Dog Shelter is regularly brought dogs by municipalities and the police, adding further strain to their already stretched resources. A Lakatamia municipality representative told The Cyprus Weekly: “Your reader must be mistaken. We have proper facilities which are regularly inspected,”he said.
The representative also said that the dogs were often kept for longer than the prescribed 15 days adding:”We go in on Saturdays and Sundays to make sure they are alright,”
Strovolos municipality said they would look into the complaint.
However, animal welfare organisations maintain that municipalities keeping strays proberly are the exception to the rule.
A volunteer at another shelter elsewhere in Cyprus recently told the paper that the authorities seemed quick to enforce the law when it suited them but failed to keep up their obligations.
“I have been orders to pay to get licenses for the strays I foster temporarily until they are strong enough to go to the shelter I am associated with but I wonder where all the money is going because there are certainly no proper facilities to humanely keep strays in the area,” she said.
Fearing retribution and asking to remain anonymous, the volunteer added that she had founded concerns that some municipalities were failing to put dogs down properly, causing the animals undue suffering.
Untrained staff do not euthanize them properly and often carry out the procedure in front of the other dogs, making their final moments even more terrifying,” she said.
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