In October 2025, El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele announced an ambitious plan for the country’s street dogs and cats. He said El Salvador wanted to find a humane solution, that the government had the resources to do it and that the country could potentially develop a model capable of being replicated elsewhere in Latin America. At a time when we are watching governments in several countries respond to street dog populations with mass collection, confinement and killing, it was an announcement worth paying attention to. We wanted El Salvador to succeed because a properly funded national programme built around humane population management could demonstrate that governments have another choice.
The announcement attracted considerable international attention when Niall Harbison of Happy Doggo responded to President Bukele’s call for expertise and travelled to El Salvador. The meeting inevitably created expectations about what might follow, but Dog Desk Animal Action has since contacted Happy Doggo directly and has been told that there is no partnership. We have also written to the Salvadoran authorities seeking information about the country’s plans for its street dogs and received no response.
Almost a year after the original announcement, we are therefore left trying to establish what actually happened next.
We measure outcomes not announcements, a policy announcement is not an outcome. If a national street dog programme has been developed, we should now be able to see evidence of it. There should be information about who is responsible for delivering it, what funding has been allocated, which municipalities are participating and what work is taking place on the ground. There should be figures showing how many dogs have been sterilised and vaccinated and, where dogs have been collected from the streets, records showing where they went and what happened to them afterwards.
El Salvador already has legislation providing a framework for controlling dog and cat populations through measures including sterilisation, municipal censuses, veterinary care and responsible adoption, so the foundations for a humane approach exist. What remains difficult to establish is the scale at which those principles are being translated into action.
There have meanwhile continued to be situations in which municipalities have had to deal directly with street dogs. Earlier this year dogs were captured at Playa El Espino in Usulután following reports of attacks on tourists. Their eventual transfer into the custody of an animal organisation illustrated something we repeatedly encounter when examining street dog policy around the world. Removing a dog from a street tells us very little about whether that dog has subsequently been protected. Collection figures are not welfare outcomes. We need to know where dogs go, how they are cared for and what eventually happens to them.
The institutional landscape surrounding animal welfare in El Salvador has also changed. The Instituto de Bienestar Animal, which had been responsible for significant elements of the country’s animal welfare framework, ceased operating as an independent institution and its responsibilities were moved within government. That makes transparency surrounding responsibility for the proposed national programme even more important. Someone must now be responsible for turning the ambition announced in 2025 into measurable action.
None of this demonstrates that President Bukele’s proposed programme has been abandoned and we are not suggesting that El Salvador has adopted the mass killing or mass confinement policies we are documenting elsewhere. The problem is that nearly a year after such a significant public commitment was made, we cannot establish what has happened to it.
We welcomed the promise of a humane solution and we still want to see El Salvador deliver one. A properly funded programme based on sterilisation, vaccination, responsible ownership and transparent population management could provide an important alternative to the increasingly punitive approaches being adopted elsewhere. But good intentions have to become functioning policy and functioning policy should produce evidence that can be scrutinised.
The question we continue to ask governments around the world is therefore the same question we are asking in El Salvador. What happened to the dogs?
If the programme is operating, we would welcome the opportunity to report its progress. We would like to see the sterilisation and vaccination figures, understand how the programme is being delivered and know what outcomes are being achieved for dogs on the streets. We have already asked for information and received no response, but the absence of an answer does not make those questions any less important.
Dog Desk Animal Action will continue monitoring El Salvador through our Global Stray Dog Crisis Map because policy announcements can attract headlines, promises can create hope and ambitious plans can sound impressive. Ultimately, however, none of those things protect a single dog unless they are implemented.
Nearly a year later, El Salvador should be able to show us what happened next.