Protests by environmentalists forced the municipality of Kelardasht - a city in northern Mazandaran Province - to collect the banners the civic body had recently installed all over the city to encourage residents to kill stray dogs.
“The Kelardasht City Council had disapproved the measure from the start,” said Ali Dadjou, a council member, reports Farhikhtegan daily.
It is not the responsibility of municipalities to kill street dogs, he said. Rather, the environment protection agencies should deal with the issue, he added.
“Nevertheless, everyone believes killing healthy animals is wrong and the council will only deal with stray animals with contagious diseases like tetanus, rabidity, and scabies which can be transmitted to humans,” said Dadjou.
Kelardasht locals say dog slaughtering has quite a history in the region. In the past, whenever the number of stray dogs increased due to high reproduction rates, the hunters and villagers rounded up the animals and shot them, said a resident.
However, the unethical tradition seemed to be disappearing, he said, until the civic body again encouraged people to kill the canines.
Earlier, in a similar action, the municipality of Mashhad metropolitan city in Khorasan Razavi Province, northeast Iran, offered cash incentives for people, encouraging them to kill dogs, whether or not they had any communicable diseases.
Environment experts say municipalities need to focus on preventing breeding of stray animals rather than on their brutal killing.
