…records an average of 5 dog bites per month
Staff Reporter
Masvingo City Council has embarked on mandatory dog vaccination exercises in conjunction with the veterinary service department mainly in the Rujeko suburb.
The command vaccination program was necessitated by a report of a rabid pitbull that attacked five people in the area in February.
This was confirmed by Masvingo City Acting director of housing and environmental services Sithabile Matava.
She said after a report, the dog was taken for samples, and it was discovered that it had rabies. Since then, they have been vaccinating all dogs in the area and catching all those found roaming around since they could not establish if the rabid dog had not infected other dogs before its death at the hands of angry residents.
“On 19 February we received a report of a pit bull that had attacked five people in Rujeko Surbub. We only got the report after a day of the incident and people had already killed the dog. We dispatched a team to Rujeko and considering how vicious it was, we took samples from the dead dog and discovered that it had rabies.
“So currently we have centralized our vaccination program to Rujeko since that is where the rabid dog was. We had a mass vaccination on March 06 and so far we have vaccinated 169 dogs and we are also rounding up those that are roaming around the residential area,” said Matava.
She said they were targeting to vaccinate dogs in the whole city at a date to be advised in April during school holidays saying from experience they had learned that if they do it during school days, the adults will be at work and some simply do not care like how youngsters do.
“We are targeting to vaccinate all dogs in the whole city in April during school holidays, we have discovered that we have a higher turnout during holidays.
“We are also urging dog owners to make sure that they vaccinate and license their dogs and we have a new bylaw which regulates dog ownership and the number of dogs each person is allowed to have. We also urge members of the public to report roaming dogs to Masvingo City Health Department,” she said.
The local authority recently resolved to conduct a dog census to ascertain the number of dogs in the city to be able to put dog bite control measures in place.
