The Dogs of Bucharest

Dogs are mysteriously being gunned down. People are murdered in their apartments - some watching dog videos before being blown away by their killers. Inspector Georgescu and Lieutenant Enache investigate and find a link between the dog killers and those being killed. A self-styled commando team is taking them out in the name of animal rights. The dog killers, in turn, have been employed by high-level military officials. Though disguised in a thick web of obfuscation, Georgescu and Enache discover that senior officials believe the stray dog and rabies problem played up in the media to be a threat to EU accession in 2007. The team of veteran municipal police officials move aggressively ahead to bring the culprits to justice and stop both the killing of dogs and dog killers. George Guess was born in New York City and educated at the University of California, Berkeley. For sixteen years, he was a university professor in political science and public administration. He worked in Romania for a year and a half on two foreign aid projects based in Bucharest - one that strengthened local government financial management and one that improved parliamentary operations. He currently lives in Budapest, Hungary, with his wife Regula and dog Benny.

It is an understatement to say that life imitiates art when it happens all the time in Eastern Europe! At the NATO summit in Bucharest last week (early April 2008), Western leaders such as President Bush had to be protected from vicious attacks by the city's famous packs of stray dogs. Despite efforts by previous city adminstrations and President Basesu (especially when he was mayor), there are still over 100,000 strays in a city of 1.7m that bite around 9000 people a year. A number of people have been killed, more have been mauled, and many have been bitten and given rabies. Animal rights groups still believe that most of the dogs are peaceful, which given the enormous number of them on the streets, has to be true. The groups forced through laws that now prevent spaying, neutering or euthanizing the dogs. Predictably, the strays breed unabated, filling up the dog pounds and making further capture of them by authorities useless.

Had all this happened a year ago when Romania was trying (successfully it turned out) to acceed to the EU, they might not have been granted entry because of failure to comply with EU health regulations. The whole script was there for interested leaders to read as early as three years ago. Had Romanian leaders read Dogs of Bucharest when it was published in 2005, much of this continuing farce could have been prevented! Readers will recall that Inspector Georgescu and Lt. Enache shrewdly figured out the government's corrupt game of killing strays with hit squads hired by special ministry units. The special dog catchers used last week at the summit were no match for these people! The crack detective team also figured out the response by animal rights zealots to finish off the dog killers. The current response of blocking mistreatment of strays via laws is much more civilized but ultimately destructive of human life in exhange. This epic clash between the values of civilized decency and law and order is illustrated nicely by the continuing saga of stray dogs in Bucharest. You can trace the historical roots of this modern problem and hopefully come up with better solutions than a new "war on dog terror", by reading Dogs of Bucharest.