Čačak Dog Shelter Has Opened

The shelter for abandoned animals in Milićevci near Čačak began operating two months ago and currently houses 15 dogs removed from the city streets.

It has a modern, fully equipped 200 square metre administration building with a surgical unit for operations and sterilisation of animals, and rooms for the vet, volunteers and the manager. It has accommodation capacity for 100 dogs and 10 cats. It currently occupies 40 ares of the total 2.8 hectares owned by the "Zoohigijena" unit. Its core activity is the temporary care of abandoned animals, as well as the removal of dead animals from public areas, disinfection and rodent control.

"Zoohigijena has three lines of work, two of which we have already started, and one we have not yet: disinfection, pest control and rodent control, because more staff need to be hired, above all chemical technicians who would do that part of the job. For two months now we have been removing dead animals from public areas and from breeding facilities. The third line is the shelter for stray animals, which deals with catching and caring for abandoned dogs and cats from the urban and rural areas of Čačak. Our service registers every dog and cat we catch and bring to the shelter. This is followed by veterinary treatment, which consists of cleaning the dogs of parasites, then vaccinating them against rabies, microchipping them and finally sterilising or neutering them. In practice, this way we prevent the animals from breeding further once they are returned to their habitat. In this way, in the foreseeable future, the number of dogs on the streets will start to decrease. Of course, we will also offer a service called adoption. Anyone who is interested and wants to adopt a dog will be able to do so," says Aleksandar Maksimović, head of the "Zoohigijena" unit at the public utility company "Komunalac".

The City of Čačak invested 27 million 200 thousand dinars in the construction of the shelter for abandoned animals, and 6.8 million was set aside for the purchase of equipment. The first returns on this investment, primarily in terms of a reduced number of stray animals, will be visible in 3 to 5 years, and the city administration expects this to be directly reflected in lower budget costs for compensation claims filed by citizens over stray dog bites.

"For compensation for stray dog bites, the city paid a little over thirteen million dinars last year, partly through settlements and partly through court rulings. We believe this will of course decrease this year and in the years to come, but we all have to work together on educating our citizens so that we remove stray animals as soon as possible, above all from the urban part of the city, so that they pose as little danger as possible to the youngest and everyone else," said Milun Todorović, Mayor of Čačak. The shelter's records list around 100 locations in the urban and rural areas where strays have been spotted and where the animal catching teams intervene. Zoohigijena will also respond to reports from citizens, who can call 064-8148115.The shelter's doors are open to everyone who wants to adopt an animal taken off the streets, because the accommodation capacity is not sufficient to care for all the strays, of which, by rough estimates, there are between 1,500 and 2,000 on the streets of Čačak. The shelter points out that its services are not intended for owned dogs or cats.

"A large number of people who have pet dogs call us because they want to get rid of them. We do not work with owned dogs, only with abandoned animals, so that option is out of the question, at least for now. We are even considering it, but the current capacity is insufficient even for stray dogs. We will probably not go in that direction, because the fees people would have to pay for such a dog are astronomical. In Belgrade, the price of placing an owned dog in a shelter is 150 thousand dinars. I expect that we will increase the number of kennels over time, because we currently use about 40 ares of the 2.8 hectares of land," said Aleksandar Maksimović.

The shelter currently employs 9 people, Komunalac workers assigned to the "Zoohigijena" unit. The shelter has a vehicle and two trailers with equipment for catching strays, as well as an incinerator for disposing of the carcasses of dead or euthanised animals. Over the past two months, around 100 strays removed from the city streets and 50 from the rural area have passed through this unit.

As a reminder, construction of the shelter in Milićevci began in August 2014, and in the previous period the city hired the companies "Naš dom" from Požega and "MB-Avenija" from Novo Selo near Vrnjačka Banja for stray removal services.

Ivana Subotić