Urban feral dogs

Excerpts from an article at The Atlantic/Cities:

According to the city government, a staggering 64,000 feral dogs live on Bucharest’s streets, giving the metro area, population 2.3 million, more than twice as many street dogs per capita as Detroit, its closest U.S. rival... Bucharestians will vote on October 6 on whether or not to allow euthanasia for the city's entire stray dog population.

Large stray dog populations are common across Southeastern Europe. Around the 2004 Olympics, there were unconfirmed allegations that Athens planned to kill as many as 15,000 stray dogs, though some of this number were eventually neutered and re-homed. A sad by-product of economic dire straits, Greece’s stray dog numbers are now rising again due to the crisis. As many families can no longer afford to feed their pets, they set them loose on the streets, preferring to imagine a lean future of scavenging for their dogs rather than instant euthanasia at overstretched pounds...

As experience in Detroit shows, however, killing large numbers of dogs is expensive and complicated even if you disregard the suffering such a move would cause.

More details at the link.