Where are Liska, Poko and Sharka? Neighbourhood dogs are vanishing in Prilep, and the shelter's cages are empty

Liska, Dushko, Svetle, Simba, Belka, Poko, Noli and Sharka. These aren't numbers in a register - they're names the whole neighbourhood knows. And according to the animal welfare association Anima Mundi, every one of them disappeared from the streets of Prilep in September.

Residents of the Tochila neighbourhood turned to the association because nobody would tell them where their dogs had gone. Liska, a calm, well-socialised dog who kept watch over the street, was caught on 17 September, according to witnesses. Residents went straight to the shelter intending to formally adopt her. Liska wasn't there. According to people who were inside, the cages were empty - even though dogs had been seen being rounded up across town in the preceding days.

"Where are the dogs? Who caught them and where were they taken?" Anima Mundi asks. According to the association, some of the missing dogs had already been neutered and had ear tags, and there is information that some of them have owners.

The association has asked the public utility company Komunalec in Prilep for records of every capture and transport between 1 and 23 September: locations, intake at the shelter, veterinary treatment, adoption or release back onto the street. It has also requested information from the Food and Veterinary Agency, which has already carried out an emergency inspection, as well as from the Interior Ministry and the Municipality of Prilep.

According to Anima Mundi, clearing a neighbourhood of known, neutered dogs actually opens up space for new, unneutered ones that nobody in the area knows. In other words, if this was population control, it's working in reverse.

Anima Mundi points out that every dog in the population control system must be handled under the Law on the Protection and Welfare of Animals - and that dogs can't simply vanish without a record. If Komunalec has the records, why hasn't it shown them by now? And if it doesn't, then who decided Liska's fate?