Ub's Silent and Costly Problem: Stray Animals

Stray animals used to roam freely in Ulaanbaatar until the government decided to get rid of the problem. Between January and September of this year, approximately 65,000 stray cats and dogs have been killed by hired sharpshooter, tearing a hole of 829 million MNT into the country's budget. Their attempts, however, have proven to be unsuccessful.

I sat down with T.Zoriglon, the director of Lucky Paws NGO, to discuss the issue of the stray animal situation in Mongolia's capital. Lucky Paws is the only NGO in Mongolia that focuses on stray animal welfare in the country. It was founded by young animal-lovers in 2013, and was officially registered in April 2014.

According to T.Zoriglon, the sharpshooters hired by the government operate during the early morning hours with their main targets being dogs, as cats are too difficult to catch and shoot.

'The shooting companies do very bad things. Some of them catch the dogs, collect them alive, take them to another place and kill them one by one before their eyes. They are trying to catch them with a sort of lasso and accidently cut the dog's neck. Some dogs escape with big wounds,' says T.Zoriglon.

'Little puppies are even beaten to death. They don't want to spend a bullet on them,' he adds.

Apparently, a dog's life is worth 12,500 MNT, which is approximately 5.5 USD. The price was raised this April from 7,500 MNT. In the same month under the former government, another regulation was implemented. From then on, it became open for anyone to make some extra money by taking dogs to the shooting companies hired by the government. Especially the poor and homeless have made use of this regulation, though T.Zoriglon states that even some teenagers saving up for computer games would exploit this opportunity.

When it comes to problem solution, the so-called culling campaigns are, however, nothing but a farce. They do not solve the problem; they merely contain it for a year as the stray animal population is set back to its starting point of the year before.

Even the numbers show that there has not been any improvement over the several last years. In fact, in 2012, 346.6 million MNT was spent on killing 77,037 stray animals, in 2013 it was 664.2 million MNT for 91,666 dogs and cats, in 2014 it was 898 million MNT for 87,200 abimals, and in 2015 it was 461.6 million MNT for a total of 61,544 stray animals.

To do the math, over the course of four years, around 383,000 animals were eliminated, costing the...