24 Chassa Daily Newspaper, February 9, 1999 (No. 37/1999)

By Stiliyan Ivanov, director

The brutal murdering of stray dogs is a practical lesson for the teenagers how murder can be one completely deliberate and unpunished act.

Mayors sign without much thinking the death sentences of thousands of living beings, whose only guilt is that they have been born. Their attitude to these beings is like to street garbage, which has to be cleared away!

It may prove useful for all city and town governors to see in the evening news, maybe before the weather forecast, how brave men clean Sofia, Plovdiv, Varna...

The picture is bloody, indeed: writhing bodies, stricken by the poison spread around the garbage containers, the whining of "homeless dogs" skinned alive. The howling of "mongrels", closed in metal cages and given to research institutes...

At this sight hardly anyone would back the distortions of the town governors.

Words fail me to describe the insanity we are witnessing at the end of the 20th century. The murders en masse of stray dogs during Zhivkov's time [Todor Zhivkov, president of Bulgaria till November 1989, dictator; only after November 1989 Bulgaria becomes a democracy] and later during Mayor Yanchoulev's failed to resolve the problem of stray dogs. About a dozen thousand innocent beings have been slaughtered, without the elimination of the real cause! Mayors seem to believe that dogs are born out of flower pollen or the spring wind and that is why they undersign the public executions every "season"?! And those guilty, in fact, are the people. Those of us who enjoy playing with the fluffy four-legged being and when it grows up, they drive it out of their house. In this way thousands of dogs find themselves in the streets.

Big penalty taxes and harsh sanctions must be established for such people. Only then will the "disease" be cured, because what is not being treated with a scalpel are actually the symptoms.

If I am not right, after this year's bloody cleansing, there must never be a single stray dog any more! But as soon as next year the streets will be full of "mongrels" and the reason for this will not be again the pollen and the spring-wind!

It is another matter if by their actions "the wise" mayors are serving someone's economic interests: skins free of charge, cheap bone meal, animal fats given on credit and "great win" for the research laboratories... And as a bonus, the money granted by foreign environmental organisations get into someone's pocket.

In conclusion I shall take the liberty of quoting the world famous champion of the living nature Gerald Durrell, who says that the animals have no deputies in parliament. They cannot write or organise strikes. No one backs them besides we, the people, who coexist with them in a world, which is not our own property alone.

And let the city governors not come out with the trick about "hundreds of people bitten by dogs". Because hundreds have also been "bitten" by the Central Heating Services, the Bulgaria Telecommunications Company, and the Tax Administration, but against them no posses have been organised nor poisons spread and no live skinning. And that should have been done!

[Published in the 24 Chassa Daily Newspaper on Feb. 9, 1999 (No. 37/1999), p.9]