A dog is captured.

Someone may be paid for finding the dog. Someone may be paid for catching the dog. A vehicle may be contracted to transport the dog. A pound, shelter or private facility may receive money to hold it. Veterinary treatment, sterilisation, food, identification and disposal may all carry separate costs.

Public money moving through an animal management system is not, by itself, evidence of wrongdoing. Humane capture requires trained staff. Dogs need safe transport, veterinary care, food and appropriate accommodation. Those services cost money and the people providing them should be properly trained and paid.

The question is not whether money is being spent. The question is what the payment is rewarding.

When The Dog Becomes The Unit Of Payment

In August 2026, Seremban City Council in Malaysia announced a scheme offering members of the public RM50 for every adult stray dog and RM25 for every puppy surrendered to the council.

The dogs had to be delivered alive and without serious injuries, but the scheme immediately created a financial incentive to identify, catch and surrender dogs. Being unlicensed or having no visible proof of ownership did not necessarily mean that a dog had no family, community carer or recognised territory.

The council said the programme was intended to control the stray dog population and improve cleanliness, safety and community wellbeing. Lawyers for Animal Rights described it as a cash for capture scheme and raised questions about training, ownership checks, microchip scanning, capture procedures and what would happen to the dogs after surrender. Those questions go to the heart of the problem.

If payment depends upon producing a dog, the system rewards the person who produces the dog. It does not automatically reward careful identification, safe handling, protection of owned or community dogs, or a good outcome after capture.

The Seremban scheme was scheduled to operate from 24 August until 30 November 2026. Yet members of the public were being encouraged to undertake an activity that official veterinary guidance reportedly recognises as high risk and requiring trained personnel.

A capture incentive without robust safeguards does not merely fund an animal control programme. It creates a market for dogs.

The Contract Does Not End At Capture

In Astrakhan, Russia, a municipal contract worth 9.99 million rubles was awarded for work involving unowned animals until the end of December 2026.

The contracted services cover capture, temporary confinement and euthanasia. The region is operating under an extraordinary animal-management regime in which street dogs including sterilised and tagged dogs may be collected. Unclaimed animals can remain within a system that permits killing rather than return to their territory.

This is a different financial model from Malaysia’s public surrender payment, but the dog still enters an economic chain.

The municipality purchases a service. A provider wins the contract. Capture, confinement and death can all become contract deliverables.

That does not establish how many dogs will be caught or killed. The widely circulated estimate that approximately 500 dogs could die appears to be a calculation based on the contracts value rather than a confirmed contractual target.

What the contract does establish is that public money has been allocated to a system in which dogs can be captured, detained and euthanised.

The public should not have to calculate possible deaths from a contract total. The authority should publish the specification, payment structure, welfare standards and outcome records itself.

Even Supposed Humane Programmes Need Financial Scrutiny

Payment per dog is not confined to capture and kill systems.

In Mumbai, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation approved three-year contracts worth ₹23 crore for stray-dog sterilisation. Payments of ₹1,450, ₹1,650 or ₹1,850 per dog were reported, with the rate varying according to factors including who captured the dog, who provided the facility and whether the dog was returned to its original location.

Sterilisation and vaccination can form part of humane population management. Properly designed and independently monitored, these programmes can protect dogs and communities.

But a humane objective does not remove the need for accountability.

Where payment is made per dog, authorities must be able to prove that each dog existed, was captured safely, received the treatment claimed, recovered appropriately and was returned to the correct location. Identification must be reliable enough to prevent duplicate claims or the repeated capture of the same animal.

The financial structure must support the welfare outcome not simply the highest possible throughput.

Follow The Dog And Follow The Money

Every publicly funded stray dog programme should create two complete and auditable trails.

The first should follow the dog: where the animal was found, who authorised the capture, who carried it out, how ownership was checked, whether the dog was scanned for a microchip, where it was transported, what treatment it received and whether it was returned, reclaimed, adopted, transferred, confined or killed.

The second should follow the money: which authority approved the expenditure, who received payment, what triggered that payment, what evidence had to be submitted and who independently verified that the contracted work was completed lawfully and humanely.

Without both trails, capture numbers tell us very little.

An authority may announce that thousands of dogs have been collected without disclosing where they went. A contractor may be paid for animal management without the public being able to see whether that meant sterilisation, permanent confinement or euthanasia. A shelter may receive money for long term care without publishing how many dogs remain alive or whether the facility has sufficient staff and space.

The language becomes administrative. The dog disappears inside it.

The Payment Model Shapes The Behaviour

Different systems create different incentives.

Payment for every dog captured can encourage volume. Payment for every day a dog is confined can make prolonged detention financially valuable. A fixed price contract can create pressure to reduce the cost of food, staffing and veterinary care. Payment for sterilisation can reward valuable work, but without identification and auditing it may also create opportunities for false or duplicate claims.

None of those outcomes is inevitable. They are foreseeable risks and responsible authorities are supposed to design safeguards against foreseeable risks.

A credible system should never rely upon trust alone. It should require trained and identifiable capture teams, body camera or time stamped capture records where appropriate, microchip scanning, public intake registers, veterinary documentation, individual animal records, capacity limits, clear euthanasia criteria, independent inspections and published outcome figures.

Contracts should also state what happens when a provider breaches welfare standards, loses track of a dog or submits an inaccurate claim.

If an authority cannot answer those questions, it should not be commissioning the work.

Public Money Requires Public Accountability

Stray dog management is often presented as an unavoidable response to a public problem. That framing can make contracts, capture targets and removal figures appear neutral. They are not neutral to the dog being removed.

Every decision determines who has the authority to touch that animal, where the animal will be taken and whether it will ever return.

Dog Desk Animal Action is not arguing that animal management staff, veterinarians or responsible shelters should work without funding. That would be impossible. We are asking something much more fundamental:

Is the money purchasing humane, traceable care or merely the disappearance of dogs from public view?

A dog should never become valuable to a system simply because somebody can be paid to capture, confine or kill it.

Share

Uganda is already on the Dog Desk Animal Action Global Stray Dog Crisis Map Watchlist, and a development in Adjumani District has given us another reason to keep it there. During a district task force meeting on 27 August, Assistant Resident District Commissioner Sharon Apio Baru reportedly called for the immediate culling of stray dogs and proposed poisoning as the method.

There is another part of the reported comments that particularly concerns us. The official reportedly suggested that poisoning had been used in other districts. We want to know where those operations took place, which authorities authorised them, how many dogs were killed and what substances were used. We also want to establish whether poisoning free roaming dogs is permitted or recognised as a method of dog population control in Uganda.

Those are important questions because not only is it a vile, cruel method of culling that causes the dog extreme & prolonged suffering, the poison does not know which animal an authority intends to kill. An owned dog can encounter poisoned bait. So can community dogs, wildlife and other animals. Poisoned carcasses can create another route of exposure.

There is also a much bigger question about what killing achieves - nothing!

Free roaming dog populations do not appear simply because dogs have not been killed quickly enough. They are shaped by reproduction, abandonment, roaming owned dogs, access to food and waste, responsible ownership and the availability of sustained population management programmes. Remove dogs without addressing those conditions and the conditions remain. Other dogs can reproduce, move into vacated territories or be abandoned into the same environment.

Killing can make dogs disappear from a particular street. That is not the same thing as solving the problem.

Effective population management requires authorities to understand the dog population they are dealing with and intervene before killing becomes the default response. Sterilisation needs to operate at meaningful scale. Owned dogs need to be identifiable. Abandonment and uncontrolled breeding need to be addressed. Communities need access to veterinary services and local authorities need strategies capable of being sustained for years rather than days.

None of that offers the immediate visibility of a cull. It does something much more important. It changes the conditions that create the population in the first place.

Uganda was already on our Watchlist before the comments from Adjumani. We are not changing its classification because one official has proposed poisoning dogs, but we are recording this development as part of the evidence we use to assess the direction in which the country is moving.

If Adjumani authorises a poisoning operation, we will record it. If we establish that other Ugandan districts have already used poisoning as a method of controlling free roaming dogs, we will examine those operations too. We will look for municipal and district instructions, official announcements, procurement records and evidence showing what happened to the dogs.

We will also look for the alternative story, because Uganda does not have to move towards lethal control. If authorities are expanding sterilisation, developing humane population management programmes or replacing killing with sustainable interventions, that evidence belongs on our map record as well.

The Global Stray Dog Crisis Map is not intended simply to identify countries where something terrible has already happened. The Watchlist exists partly so that we can identify warning signs while there is still an opportunity for a different direction to be taken. Adjumani is one of those warning signs.

For now, Uganda remains on the Watchlist. But when poisoning stray dogs is being proposed by a government official, we need to know whether we are hearing an isolated suggestion or seeing the beginnings of something much bigger.

Share

Kerala has introduced a new Standard Operating Procedure governing the euthanasia of street dogs considered aggressive or seriously diseased. The Government Order, G.O.(Ms) No.116/2026/LSGD, was issued by the Local Self Government Department on 22 August 2026.

There is an important distinction to make at the outset. This is not a policy authorising indiscriminate killing of street dogs, and it should not be reported as one. Humane euthanasia can be necessary where a dog is suffering from an incurable condition or catastrophic injury, and rabies presents an obvious and serious public-health concern. The new procedure also contains safeguards intended to prevent arbitrary killing.

The difficult part lies elsewhere. What happens when the reason for killing a dog is its behaviour?

Under the new procedure, dogs falling within categories including incurable disease, mortal injury, rabies and dangerous or aggressive behaviour may be considered for euthanasia. Local Stray Dog Management Committees are expected to make written recommendations and veterinary professionals are responsible for carrying out euthanasia using prescribed methods.

On paper, introducing a formal decision making process is preferable to dogs being poisoned, shot or killed without records. Kerala’s earlier work on the SOP was itself prompted by concerns about uncertainty and arbitrary euthanasia, with the Animal Husbandry Department seeking clearer criteria for determining when a dog could properly be regarded as aggressive.

But creating a procedure does not remove the central difficulty. Aggression is not a simple label.

A dog can bite because it is frightened. A mother can defend her puppies. A dog being cornered or captured may react defensively. Territorial behaviour can include barking and chasing. Pain can alter behaviour. A frightened street dog surrounded by unfamiliar people may behave very differently from the same animal in ordinary circumstances.

None of those possibilities means genuinely dangerous dogs do not exist. The question is how authorities distinguish between them.

A dog that has repeatedly carried out serious, unprovoked attacks presents a very different situation from a dog accused of chasing somebody down a road. Yet once both can potentially sit beneath a broad description such as aggressive, violent or ferocious, the quality of the assessment becomes critical.

That is why Dog Desk Animal Action has written to Kerala’s Local Self Government Department. We have asked for the complete official English language version of G.O.(Ms) No.116/2026/LSGD and its accompanying SOP. The Government Order can be identified through Kerala’s official records, but we have not been able to locate a complete official English language version publicly available to allow the detailed provisions to be examined directly.

More importantly, we have asked what evidence will actually be required before an individual dog can be condemned on behavioural grounds. Can a complaint be enough? Can an allegation that a dog attempted to attack somebody be enough? Does chasing qualify? Must the circumstances surrounding an incident be investigated? Is an individual behavioural assessment required from a qualified veterinary professional? How are fear, pain, maternal behaviour, territorial behaviour and reactions during capture distinguished from a dog presenting a persistent and serious danger?

These are not minor procedural questions. They could determine whether the behavioural category remains a narrow provision for genuinely dangerous animals or gradually becomes a much wider route through which unwanted street dogs can be removed.

There are elements of Kerala’s approach that deserve recognition. Individual euthanasia records are reportedly required. Information including the dog’s identification, capture location, photograph or identification tag and the reason for euthanasia is expected to be recorded. That creates something Dog Desk Animal Action repeatedly looks for when examining street dog management systems: individual traceability.

If a dog is killed by a public authority, there should be a record showing which dog it was and why the decision was taken. But the existence of a register is only the beginning. The next question is whether anybody outside the authority will be able to see what it contains. We have therefore asked whether Kerala will publish euthanasia information at local authority or district level and, crucially, whether the reason for euthanasia will be recorded in the published figures.

A single total would tell us very little. If 1,000 dogs were euthanised, it would matter enormously whether 900 were suffering from confirmed rabies or catastrophic injuries and 100 were assessed as dangerously aggressive, or whether the proportions were reversed.

The categories need to remain visible.

There is another safeguard within the new procedure that deserves close attention. Reporting indicates that dogs selected for euthanasia are to spend a short period in an isolation kennel, ABC facility or shelter, during which recognised animal welfare organisations or interested individuals may be able to take them into care.

In principle, that creates an opportunity to save a dog where appropriate. In practice, a period of only a few days could be extremely difficult to use. An organisation may need to discover that the dog has been listed, assess the circumstances, locate appropriate accommodation, arrange transport and take responsibility for an animal already classified by authorities as dangerous.

That is why we have asked how notification will work, how long organisations will actually have to intervene and whether taking a dog into approved care cancels the euthanasia decision.

The procedure also reportedly provides protection for officials carrying out their duties. That needs to be understood accurately. Protection for officials acting lawfully and in good faith is not the same thing as immunity from accountability where procedures are ignored or authority is abused.

The important question is therefore what happens when somebody believes the safeguards have failed.

If the wrong dog is captured, if an assessment is inadequate, if the required evidence does not exist or if somebody alleges that a dog has been killed outside the permitted procedure, there must be a meaningful route through which that decision can be examined.

We have asked Kerala what that route is. None of these questions requires opposition to humane euthanasia. A dog dying painfully from an incurable condition should not be kept alive simply to improve a statistic. A dog with confirmed rabies presents an entirely different welfare and public health situation from a healthy community dog. There may also be exceptional cases in which careful professional assessment concludes that an individual dog’s behaviour presents a serious danger that cannot safely be managed.

The danger comes when exceptional circumstances become elastic categories.

India is already going through a profound change in the way street dogs are managed. Courts, states and municipalities are trying to reconcile human safety, rabies prevention, sterilisation, vaccination, institutional removals, shelter capacity and animal welfare law. Decisions being made now could shape the treatment of enormous numbers of dogs for years.

Kerala has chosen to create a formal process rather than leave euthanasia decisions without structure. That gives the state an opportunity to demonstrate that such decisions can be individually evidenced, professionally assessed, recorded and scrutinised. It also gives the public something against which implementation can be measured.

The most important figures will therefore come after the policy begins operating. How many dogs are euthanised? Where were they collected? Why were they killed? How many were classified as aggressive? How many were suffering from rabies or incurable disease? How many proposed euthanasia cases were instead taken into care? How many decisions were challenged? How consistently were the safeguards followed? Those figures will tell us considerably more than the existence of the SOP itself.

For now, one question sits at the centre of Kerala’s new approach. When the state decides that a street dog is too dangerous to live, what evidence will it require before making that decision?

Dog Desk Animal Action has asked Kerala’s Local Self Government Department. We will publish its response.

Share

The Philippines has been on the Dog Desk Animal Action Global Stray Dog Crisis Map Watchlist because of growing concerns about the way free roaming dogs are being managed. We have been watching municipal collection operations, impoundment, the fate of dogs once they enter pounds and the balance between lethal control and programmes designed to prevent populations from growing in the first place.

In Davao City, dog catching operations took place on 17 and 18 August across several barangays in Talomo, Buhangin and Tugbok districts. Dogs collected during those operations entered a system that gave owners a short opportunity to reclaim them, followed by a limited period in which the animals could be adopted. Those remaining unclaimed and unadopted were scheduled for euthanasia on 25 and 26 August.

We are no longer looking at dogs being removed from streets because of complaints, rabies concerns or public safety. We are looking at a municipal process in which collection can begin a countdown towards death.

Davao is not the only place where dogs are being collected. In Santa Maria, Bulacan, dogs were recently rounded up from a subdivision in Barangay Caysio following complaints about roaming animals and taken to a municipal pound. Appeals subsequently went out seeking adopters and rescuers because of concerns that dogs remaining there could face euthanasia.

Dog catching activity has also continued elsewhere, including a rabies control operation in Mambajao, Camiguin on 22 August. We do not currently have sufficient evidence to establish the outcomes for those dogs, and it would be wrong to assume that collection automatically means euthanasia. But that uncertainty illustrates precisely why we are watching the Philippines so closely.

There is nothing inherently wrong with authorities intervening where free roaming dogs present genuine welfare, public health or safety concerns. Rabies remains a serious issue and governments have responsibilities both to their citizens and to animals. We want to know what happens after the truck leaves.

If dogs are collected, there should be transparent records showing how many entered the system, how many were reclaimed, how many were adopted or transferred, how many remained in care and how many were euthanised. Without those figures, it becomes extremely difficult to understand the real consequences of municipal dog-catching programmes. This becomes even more important when holding periods are short.

A dog may have been owned and become lost. A community dog may have people feeding and monitoring it without anyone formally recognised as its owner. A frightened animal entering a pound may need time before it is suitable for adoption. Rescue organisations also need time to find foster homes, transport and space. When the period between collection and potential euthanasia is measured in days, those opportunities become very small.

There is another side to the Philippine picture and it is important that we acknowledge it. Municipalities are also investing in sterilisation and rabies vaccination. Quezon City, for example, provides free anti rabies vaccination and spay/neuter services and has developed rehabilitation and adoption initiatives alongside its animal-control work.

But the scale of municipal custody is significant. Quezon City reports that more than 42,000 stray or abandoned animals were taken into custody between 2023 and June 2026. Numbers of that size make outcome transparency essential. Knowing how many animals were collected tells us how busy an animal control system was. It does not tell us whether that system protected them.

That distinction sits at the heart of our Global Stray Dog Crisis Map. We do not move countries into Crisis just because they have street dogs. We look at what governments are doing in response to them. Mass removal, lethal population control, prolonged confinement, inadequate shelter capacity, weak traceability and policies that expose large numbers of dogs to poor welfare outcomes are all significant.

Repeated municipal collection operations combined with short holding periods and the potential euthanasia of dogs that are not reclaimed or adopted create a pattern we cannot treat as routine animal control. If collection continues at scale while dogs entering pounds face lethal outcomes within days, the case for changing the Philippines’ classification will become increasingly difficult to resist.

What we need now is outcome data. How many dogs were collected in Davao during the August operations? How many went home? How many were adopted? How many were transferred for rehabilitation? How many were euthanised on 25 and 26 August? And the same questions should be capable of being answered across every municipality operating a dog pound.

The Philippines still has an opportunity to move in the other direction. Investment in large scale sterilisation, sustained rabies vaccination, identification, responsible ownership and adoption could reduce the number of dogs entering municipal custody in the first place. But prevention has to operate at sufficient scale to change what is happening on the streets.

For now, the Philippines remains on the Dog Desk Animal Action Global Stray Dog Crisis Map Watchlist. We are watching what happens next very closely. Because when dogs can move from the street to a municipal pound and towards euthanasia within a matter of days, the distance between Watchlist and Crisis is becoming uncomfortably small.

Share

A dog in Kazakhstan no longer has to be incurably ill or proven dangerous before the state can lawfully end their life. Under legislation now in force, dogs may be euthanised as part of a policy to regulate the number of stray animals.

That distinction is fundamental. Illness may be assessed. Dangerous behaviour may be investigated. Suffering may justify…

Read more

Mersin Metropolitan Municipality has published plenty of numbers about its work with stray animals since Türkiye’s amended animal protection law came into force. Thousands of dogs have been sterilised, thousands have been adopted and substantial new capacity has been created to accommodate animals. On the surface there is a considerable amount of inform…

Read more

Türkiye says that 97% of the country’s stray animals have now been collected. But how many animals does 97% actually represent, and what happened to them after they were removed from the streets?

A dog can be collected and taken to a shelter, adopted, transferred elsewhere, remain in long term confinement, die in care or be euthanised. Knowing that an an…

Read more

In November 2025, Algeria appeared to take an important step towards changing the way its street dogs were managed. The Ministry of Agriculture instructed authorities to bring an immediate end to brutal and systematic killing campaigns and called for a move towards a more coordinated approach involving veterinary services, sterilisation and vaccination.

…

Read more

A dog died during an operation organised by Klang Royal City Council in Malaysia. A volunteer who took part in that operation has now appeared in court accused of causing the dog unnecessary pain or suffering by allegedly strangling him with a looped restraint. The defendant has pleaded not guilty. The allegation has not been proved and the case is due …

Read more

Morocco’s new law on stray animals is no longer a proposal. Law 19.25 was promulgated on 28 July 2026 and published in the Official Gazette on 10 August, bringing a new national framework for the management of stray animals into force.

On paper, the law contains measures that should improve protection. It provides for authorised centres to collect, ident…

Read more

On 17 August 2026, an incident was reported from Chak 72/4-R in Sahiwal, Punjab, where a Sahiwal District Council employee was carrying out a stray dog culling drive. By the time local residents confronted him, two dogs had reportedly already been killed. What happened afterwards became a criminal matter. The employee was allegedly kidnapped and assault…

Read more

Between 1 January 2025 and 3 August 2026, 13,481 dogs were reportedly collected and taken into Denizli Metropolitan Municipality’s shelter system.

The outcome figures attributed to the municipality’s own monitoring table record 1,553 dogs as adopted, 735 as euthanised, 10,580 as having died from natural causes and 613 as remaining in the shelter.

Those fi…

Read more

Belagavi Municipal Corporation in Karnataka is planning two permanent sterilisation centres for the city’s street dogs, one serving the north and another the south. At a time when dog management across India is increasingly dominated by arguments about removal, confinement and where dogs should be allowed to live, investment in permanent sterilisation i…

Read more

For years, the global debate around stray dogs has focused on population numbers, dog attacks, rabies, shelters and the argument over whether dogs should be sterilised, confined or killed.

The more closely we examine these systems, the more obvious something else becomes. Stray dogs have become an economy.

Public money is paid to catch them. Contractors a…

Read more

Astrakhan has awarded another publicly funded contract for the capture and management of dogs without owners.

The contract is worth 9.99 million rubles approximately (£88,000 or US$119,000) and will remain in force until 31 December 2026. The procurement attracted only one bidder. Although the auction was formally declared unsuccessful because there was …

Read more

Something happening in Mumbai has caught our attention. The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) is drawing up plans to deal with street dogs who must be removed from specified institutional premises following directions from India’s Supreme Court. These include places such as schools, colleges, hospitals, railway stations and bus depots. Dogs remov…

Read more

The Gorakhpur Municipal Corporation in India plans to microchip thousands of street dogs and create individual digital records. This proposal interests us because individual identification could address a common gap in stray dog management: traceability. We often seek information from authorities about the fate of collected dogs, and this system could p…

Read more

This morning I woke to a most disturbing notification on my phone.

The Seremban City Council in Malaysia is planning on paying people to catch dogs and then hand them over. Yes, you read that right. Ordinary citizens can catch stray dogs for a financial reward. They can scoop them up from the streets & cash them in at the local council.

This is not respo…

Read more

One of the questions people often ask when they first see the Dog Desk Animal Action Global Stray Dog Crisis Map is why the United States is coloured green.

After all, America has animal shelters under pressure, dogs entering rescue systems in large numbers and ongoing debates about euthanasia. To some observers, that hardly sounds like a country that sh…

Read more

Authorities in Baubau, a city in Southeast Sulawesi, planned to scatter poisoned food along its streets over five consecutive nights in an operation targeting as many as 2,000 dogs. This was not an allegation made after unidentified dogs were found dead. It was an operation publicly announced by the city’s Agriculture and Food Security Department.

Beginning on 27 July 2026, municipal teams intended to distribute fish mixed with poison between 10 pm and 5 am. Officials said they would return each morning to collect any remaining bait, remove the bodies of dead dogs and transport them to landfill.

The operation was scheduled to continue until 31 July.

It was presented as necessary to protect Baubau from rabies. Yet the city’s own animal health official confirmed that Baubau remained rabies free. Although dog bites had been reported between January and July, none of the dogs investigated had been found to have rabies.

Healthy dogs were facing death by poison in the name of preventing a disease that had not been detected among them.

An Unsupported Claim Of Tens Of Thousands

Officials claimed that the number of roaming dogs in Baubau had increased to tens of thousands. No census, survey, methodology or supporting data was published.

The target of 2,000 dogs also appears to have been determined by the quantity of poisoned bait prepared for the operation not by veterinary assessments identifying 2,000 rabid, diseased or dangerous animals.

Residents were instructed to confine their dogs and cats during the night so they would not consume the poison intended for animals found on the streets.

That warning exposes the indiscriminate nature of the method. Poisoned bait cannot identify whether a dog is owned, abandoned, vaccinated, sterilised, healthy, sick or being cared for by members of the community. Nor can it prevent cats, wildlife or other animals from eating it.

The municipality’s proposed morning collection did not remove the risk created during the hours in which poisoned food would be left in public places.

The Operation Was Challenged

Animal Defenders Indonesia issued a formal legal notice to the mayor and the head of the municipal department, demanding that the poisoning be stopped.

The organisation called for Baubau to disclose the evidence behind its population claim and replace poisoning with vaccination, sterilisation and humane dog-population management.

The department subsequently reportedly confirmed in writing that the mass-elimination plan had been stopped. It said it would instead prioritise rabies vaccination and sterilisation.

Stopping the programme was the right decision, but it does not answer the most urgent question. Did dogs die before it was stopped?

The legal notice was not received until 31 July, the final day of the scheduled five night operation. The municipality has not published an operational report showing whether bait was distributed during any of the preceding nights. It hasn’t disclosed how much poison was issued, how much was recovered or whether any dogs bodies were taken to landfill.

Did The Plan Breach Indonesian Law?

Indonesia does not leave the treatment and killing of animals entirely to municipal discretion. Government Regulation No. 95 of 2012 on Veterinary Public Health and Animal Welfare establishes requirements that appear directly relevant to what Baubau proposed.

Article 95 requires an animal’s killing to be carried out without causing fear and stress and by a method that ends suffering as quickly as possible.

Article 96 states that when animals are killed for the control of infectious diseases or zoonoses, the decision must be based upon a veterinarian’s medical assessment.

Most significantly, Article 99 prohibits giving animals substances that cause poisoning, injury or death.

A programme that deliberately places poisoned food in public areas to kill unidentified dogs therefore appears extremely difficult to reconcile with these provisions. Baubau has not published individual veterinary assessments or evidence that the targeted dogs were infected with rabies. Its own official said the city remained free from the disease.

Whether the operation amounted to an enforceable legal violation would ultimately have to be determined by the relevant Indonesian authorities or a court. Nevertheless, the wording of the national regulation raises serious questions about how such a programme was authorised in the first place.

Poisoning Dogs Does Not Eliminate Rabies

Baubau’s plan also conflicts with the strategy Indonesia has adopted for eradicating human deaths caused by dog-mediated rabies.

The country’s national roadmap is built around vaccination, humane dog population management, surveillance, public education and rapid treatment for people exposed to potentially infected animals.

Killing dogs indiscriminately does not produce lasting protection from rabies. Removing animals without addressing vaccination coverage, breeding, abandonment and access to food merely creates space into which other unvaccinated dogs can move.

Poisoning can make successful disease control more difficult by frightening communities, driving dogs into hiding and destroying the cooperation needed for vaccination and surveillance.

Baubau had reportedly suspended its dog elimination programme during 2024 and 2025 because of insufficient funding. Its return in 2026 demonstrates that poisoning had remained an accepted municipal option despite Indonesia’s national animal-welfare requirements and rabies strategy.

Cancellation Cannot Be The End Of The Matter.

It is encouraging that public intervention appears to have stopped the programme and secured a pledge to vaccination and sterilisation. But a promise is not an outcome.

Baubau must now publish the authentic instruction authorising the operation, the written decision cancelling it and a complete account of anything that occurred between 27 and 31 July.

The city should disclose:

• whether poisoned bait was distributed;

• the dates and locations involved;

• how much poison was prepared, issued, used and recovered;

• whether any dogs or other animals died;

• how the bodies of any dead animals were recorded and disposed of;

• the veterinary and legal basis used to authorise the programme;

• the evidence supporting the claim that Baubau has tens of thousands of roaming dogs; and

• the timetable and funding allocated for vaccination and sterilisation.

Until those records are released, nobody can know whether the cancellation prevented the killing or merely ended an operation that had already claimed lives.

Indonesia remains on the Dog Desk Animal Action Global Stray Dog Crisis Map Watchlist. This case also shows why the country assessment cannot focus upon Bali alone. The official authorisation of mass poisoning in Southeast Sulawesi points towards a broader failure of policy, oversight and enforcement.

Baubau’s dogs were not evidence of a rabies outbreak. They were living animals condemned collectively because they were on the streets.

The operation may now have been stopped. The demand for answers must not be.

Share

Update: Dog Desk Animal Action has written to the Mayor of Baubau requesting the authorisation and cancellation documents, confirmation of whether poisoned bait was distributed, and records showing whether any animals died. We have also requested details of the promised vaccination and sterilisation programme. Any response received will be published.