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.
It was an important intervention in a country where the killing of street dogs had long been used as a method of population control. Dogs had been shot and poisoned during municipal campaigns, practices that do little to address the reasons populations continue to replenish and which have repeatedly raised serious animal welfare concerns.
The November instruction suggested Algeria recognised that something needed to change. Nine months later, municipal notices raise questions about whether that change has actually reached the dogs on the streets.
In Aït Mahmoud, in Tizi Ouzou Province, a municipal notice covering the period from 13 July to 13 August 2026 referred to an operation targeting stray dogs and cats and explicitly described the use of poisoning.
In Chechar, Khenchela Province, another municipal communication scheduled a series of night time operations for 28 July and 4, 11 and 18 August. Residents were instructed to keep their own dogs and cats confined during the operations, while a local hunting association was identified as being involved.
On 9 August, another municipal communication in Khenchela asked residents to identify locations where stray animals could be found ahead of an intervention planned for that night.
These are not accounts of what happened years before Algeria changed its approach. They are municipal communications issued during July and August 2026. That creates an obvious discrepancy.
If central government instructed authorities to end brutal and systematic killing, why are municipalities still issuing communications about operations against stray animals that appear to involve lethal control?
The answer may be more complicated than simply concluding that the national instruction has been ignored. Algeria’s intervention did not necessarily prohibit every circumstance in which an animal could lawfully be killed, and veterinary authorities retain responsibilities around disease and public safety. Individual municipal notices also do not establish the outcome for every dog targeted during an operation.
But poisoning street animals is very difficult to reconcile with the humane population management direction Algeria appeared to set in November.
A government can instruct municipalities to change their practices, but unless that instruction is accompanied by resources, veterinary capacity, sterilisation programmes, vaccination coverage, monitoring and enforcement, the old methods can remain the easiest methods available to local authorities.
For the dogs, nothing has changed if the paperwork changes but the trucks still arrive at night.
There is also a fundamental problem with repeatedly killing dogs as a population management strategy. Removing animals does not address uncontrolled breeding, abandonment, access to waste, responsible ownership or gaps in sterilisation. Unless those underlying factors are addressed, populations can recover and authorities find themselves repeating the same lethal interventions again.
Rabies presents a genuine public health challenge, but killing street dogs indiscriminately is not a substitute for sustained vaccination coverage. Effective population management requires governments to know how many dogs they are dealing with, vaccinate at sufficient scale, prevent uncontrolled reproduction and maintain those interventions over time.
If the country is genuinely replacing lethal control with sterilisation and vaccination, we should be able to see evidence of that transition. We should know how many dogs have been sterilised since the November instruction, how many have been vaccinated against rabies, which municipalities are participating and what resources have been provided to enable local authorities to stop relying on killing.
We should also be able to establish what happened during the operations announced this summer.
How many dogs were targeted? How many were captured? How many were killed? What methods were used? Were veterinary authorities involved? Were the operations compatible with the national instruction issued only months earlier?
These are questions that should have straightforward answers.
Dog Desk Animal Action is monitoring Algeria through our Global Stray Dog Crisis Map because what is happening there illustrates something we see repeatedly when examining street dog policy around the world. National announcements can sound progressive while implementation at municipal level tells a much more complicated story.
We are not suggesting that every street dog intervention taking place in Algeria amounts to indiscriminate killing, nor are we claiming outcomes for animals where those outcomes cannot currently be established. We are asking why municipal communications issued in the summer of 2026 appear so difficult to reconcile with the direction set by central government in November 2025.
Algeria said brutal and systematic killing should stop. If municipalities are still announcing lethal operations nine months later, the question is no longer simply what the national policy says. It is why dogs may still be dying under practices that policy was supposed to bring to an end.
