Bucharest Mayor's war on dogs

BUCHAREST - The Mayor of Bucharest has sparked angry protests after ordering hundreds of the city's stray dogs rounded up and killed.

Angry crowds gathered outside Traian Basescu's house over the weekend compared him to Adolf Hitler.

"They looked at you with tender eyes, and you killed them in cold blood," their banners said.

Bucharest has one of the worst stray dog problems in the world. As many as 200,000 ownerless dogs roam the streets, often attacking pedestrians.

Basescu insists the only solution is to put down unwanted street dogs.

The Romanian President, Ion Iliescu, telephoned the mayor to urge him to rethink.

The Prime Minister, Adrian Nastase, condemned the plan.

Brigitte Bardot, the French actress, intervened, but in the end she was only able to delay the start of the killings. The Brigitte Bardot Foundation pledged $140,000 to sterilise healthy street dogs and put them up for adoption. But only about 2000 dogs were adopted. An Austrian animal rights group claims that at least 280 dogs have already been put down.

Even Corneliu Vadim Tudor, who came second in presidential elections promising to lock up all the gypsies in ghettoes, has joined the protest. It seems Basescu now rivals even Tudor for notoriety.

But he insists he will not back down: "No protest by animal foundations and politicians will make me stop the plan to kill stray dogs."

- INDEPENDENT