This weekend I wrote about <a href="http://www.karolinkabulgaria.com/2012/03/31/stray-dogs-and-the-american-college-of-sofia/" target="_blank">the stray dog problem in and around the American College of Sofia</a>. It became a big deal after an elderly man was attacked by a pack of wild dogs living behind the College. <em>Scary</em>.

My parents started asking me all of these questions about the dogs during our long standing Sunday night skype date (well for them it's Sunday morning and they regularly torture me by drinking coffee and eating my dAd's homemade pancakes or waffles while we chat).  They wanted to know if the old man was okay. They wanted to know what I do to stay safe. They wanted to know what was going to happen to the dogs. They wanted to know how the problem go so out of hand.

Good questions.

Only I didn't have any good answers. Aside from the fact that the way I try to stay safe is by not walking home from school at night and if I'm still at school after dark, I try to leave with a friend as two seems better than one. However neither of these things seems especially helpful.

Now however I have a few more answers. <!--more-->

The old man is doing okay although the dogs did a number on his legs and face. The thought of what that actually means kind of makes me want to cry. <em>Poor man</em>.

Then there are the dogs. It's hard to say what's actually going to happen them. The pack is fairly large and it's being reported that they are going to round up the most aggressive members of the pack to euthanize them. Only the word around campus is that these aggressive dogs have proven difficult to capture. Go figure. So I guess they are still out their roaming the streets. <em>Awesome</em>.

That brings me to this point: nothing related to the handling of stray dogs in general or this overly aggressive pack of dogs specifically instills any real confidence in me. The preference and maybe even the law is to sterilize the dogs rather than to euthanize them. I guess this would be fine if they were actually all being sterilized but they're not. Enter babies. Moreover, somehow it's also acceptable for dog owners to turn dogs out on the street when one can no longer provide for them adding to the number of stray dogs in the city. As such the task of dealing with these dogs becomes less and less manageable.

A recent report calculated that there are 10,000 stray dogs in Sofia. I don't know about that. That seems like an awful lot of stray dogs but then again it is a big city that we live in. And really, what's a city to do with that many dogs?! That's an impossible and thankless job. One I am certainly glad that I don't have.

It does make a girl wonder. If there are that many dogs in city, how long would it take for a new pack of dogs to make themselves at home in the territory of the old dog pack? Then again, maybe somethings are better left unknown.