Introduction: Romania is frequently cited as having a stray dog problem. Fieldwork was conducted by a team of ten researchers in April 2017, visiting dog shelters and interviewing rescuers, activists and stakeholders. This paper maps the movement of dogs between different places and modes of interaction with humans as journeys through a system.
Methodology: Data includes interviews conducted by the team with ten primary informants; audio, video and photographic records; and the team’s field notes.
Stocks, sources, sinks and flows of dogs were characterised and situated within the system. Human actors and institutions encountered during fieldwork were further situated, and their work characterised as influences acting on the system’s flows.
Main results: The primary stock is the large population of dogs in the stray state. The boundaries of this stock are fuzzy and it can be usefully segmented. Other stocks are the populations in human homes in Romania and abroad, and crucially for this fieldwork, in shelters. Shelters divide initially into public and private and can be further differentiated depending on the ways dogs leave them: for some they are a stop on a journey and for others the final destination.
Dogs enter the stray state through feral birth or abandonment/release by humans. Sinks include various causes of death in the wild, including traffic accidents, individual abuse, and culls. Dogs leave shelters through adoption in or out of the country, or often through deliberate killing (especially public shelters), or eventual death from natural causes (many private shelters).
Principal conclusions and implications for field: Schematising the dog rescue ‘system’ in Romania contextualises ethnographic understandings of individuals, institutions and places. Phenomena identified include:
— rescue organisations seeking to enlarge the flow from private shelters to foreign adoption
— officials seeking to enlarge the cheapest available flows out of the stray stock
— private shelters ‘running to stand still’, taking in many dogs but struggling to re-home them
— a major flow from stray to public to private shelters, with the latter taking surplus to avoid dogs being killed
The system provides a framework for further research to quantify the stocks and flows, useful in particular for assessing the impact of possible interventions.