Within the project “Stray and stray domestic animals in Romania. Defining the social and environmental problem through a participatory approach and social innovation”, over 500 requests for public information regarding the management of stray animals, with or without a owner, were sent in 2021-2022. The information was requested from 101 county mayors-municipalities, 41 county councils, 42 sanitary-veterinary and food safety departments, 42 county agricultural departments, 42 county police inspectorates, and 246 hospitals.
The requested data was necessary to understand the context and magnitude of the stray animal problem in Romania, but also to test the transparency of the institutions. “When we started the project, we realized that we don’t know exactly how many stray dogs there are, we don’t know how many dogs there are in sheepfolds, we don’t know how many dog attacks there are annually or how many hospitalizations, or how many cats there are, etc.” said Mariana Țînțărean, project manager. “We put a lot of effort into finding out and centralizing all the information. Unfortunately, we realized that the lack of prioritization of the animal situation is also reflected in the way this type of information is collected and managed,” she added.
Thus, there was a very large number of addresses to which no response was received from the authorities together with the large number of addresses with incomplete responses, which in the case of city halls represents 69.3% of the total addresses sent, in the case of county councils – 56.1%, DSVSAs – 88.2%, DAJs – 45.2%, IJPs – 34.1% and hospitals – 66.8%. “The situation has affected us directly, because it does not allow us to draw conclusions, as well as formulate pertinent recommendations regarding the real situation”, said Alexandru Bulacu, President of the Romanian Wildlife Society, the beneficiary of the project.
A very worrying thing is that the importance of statistical data in preventing or resolving serious/abnormal situations existing in the system is not understood. Statistical data is considered an additional burden on some officials and is therefore treated largely superficially. Also, some public authority employees are not used to requesting additional information when they are not sure whether they have understood correctly or not what information is being requested and send a response in such a way as to check the legal obligation to respond.
From the responses received, it can be seen that there is no unified method at national or county level regarding the data that must be centralized, as well as the method of centralizing different statistical data. Each unit centralizes the data as it sees fit, which does not allow for analyzing the data at county or national level so that pertinent conclusions can be drawn on some phenomena or problems.
“In the absence of this unitary model respected by all public authorities, we only have partial data that cannot help draw conclusions and/or formulate recommendations or answers. It is practically impossible to show statistically, with real data collected from the field, the severity of some situations, their complexity, the problems existing in one system or another, nor can an alarm system be set up regarding the occurrence of alarming or abnormal situations and their treatment as early as possible.”, declared Alexandru Bulacu, President of SRS.
Our main recommendation is to expedite the digitization of public interest information so that any citizen has easy and quick access to the necessary data. It is also very helpful for future strategies and action plans to standardize the centralization of public interest data, in order to have real bases for a correct forecast and assessment.
The activity was carried out within the project “Stray and stray domestic animals in Romania. Defining the social and environmental problem through a participatory approach and social innovation”, a project carried out by the “Romanian Wildlife Society”, in partnership with the “Federation of the Natura 2000 Coalition Romania”, and the “Association for Community Partnership Brașov”, with the financial support of the Active Citizens Fund Romania, a program financed by Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway through the 2014-2021 EEA Grants. The aim of the project is to define the problem of stray animals from a social and environmental perspective.
The complete analytical document can be consulted on the project website.
Answers centralizer from institutions can be requested upon request: office@srswild.ro