Polish animal rights campaigners are unhappy with the present legal regulations protecting animals in this country and are drafting a new law, which may reach the parliament this month.
Krysia Kołosowska reports
The present law on preventing cruelty to animals has been in place in Poland for 11 years now and animals rights campaigners are concerned that it is not effective. The number of stray dogs and cats has not declined, animal shelters are packed to capacity, the fate of thousands of ill-treated dogs and cats has hardly improved.
Grzegorz Lindenberg, a renowned journalist and one of the founders of the Coalition for Animals, knows a lot about this from his own experience since he moved to a small village some 20 miles from Warsaw: ‘Every now and then we find here an abandoned animal. Mostly dogs, sometimes cats as well – young, old, all kinds of animals. Every time it’s a terrible problem to find a new owner. This year we’ve already had three dogs. We managed to get them new homes, but finally I understood that it’s the whole system that needs to be changed not just finding new homes for a few animals or giving some money for animal shelters. It’s not enough, it’s not going to solve the problem.’
A couple of months ago the Coalition for Animals started to draft a new law aimed at improving the lot of animals in Poland. It started modestly, but with time the task grew bigger and bigger with various other NGO’s concerned with animal rights wanting to contribute their suggestions. In the view of Grzegorz Lindenberg three things are crucial for the law to be truly effective: ‘We propose to create an institution of a national inspector for animal welfare, whose task would be to make sure that, basically, the law on animals is really carried out in Poland. We want to regulate breeding and trading in pets, dogs and cats mainly. The third thing we want to say very explicitly is that local governing bodies should take care of stray animals.’
Today most local governments regard this duty as optional. Moreover they think it boils down to catching stray dogs and cats and placing them in low cost animals shelters, where most of them die and relatively few are adopted by new owners.
There are no exact figures available as to the number of abandoned animals in Poland – but some three hundred dogs land up in the biggest animal shelter in Warsaw every month. It is said that there are over 10 thousand stray dogs in Poland but the figure may be several times higher.