If dogs make you nervous, make no plans to visit the country of Romania. For whatever reason, the nation is loaded with dogs—stray dogs. When you go for a walk, or get out of a car, or head to the store, you cannot escape them—scruffy, matted, but usually harmless.
In the capital city of Bucharest alone, there are an estimated 65,000 wild dogs—enough to fill Ford Field in Detroit or the Alamo dome in San Antonio (imagine the sound of their collective barking).
In Romania, 9,760 people were reportedly bitten by the stray dogs last year. Nationally, experts believe there are some 500,000 stray dogs in Romania. One stray dog for every 40 people.
If the same dog-to-human ratio were replicated in the U.S., we would have nearly nine million stray dogs trotting around the country. A population larger than Chicago, Boston, Denver, San Francisco, and Nashville—combined.
The question, of course, is why so many stray dogs? Our friend, Laura, from Ploesti, told us the most likely explanation is that when Dictator Nicolai Ceausescu bulldozed tens of thousands of homes with nice grassy yards and forced the people to live in tiny apartment buildings, they no longer had room for their dogs. Rather than destroy these pets, the animals were simply abandoned. Those dogs, of course, multiplied and now we have Rovers roaming Romania in huge numbers.
Dogs are not without mention in Scripture. They are at times shown as voracious consumers–Ahab's wife, Jezebel, was literally eaten by dogs. At other times, as in the story of poor Lazarus, they offer comfort—licking our wounds.
In Matthew 7:6 Jesus said, “Do not give what is holy to dogs.” So while we cannot solve the problem of dogs in Romania, the greater concern for Christ followers is that we develop a spiritual sensitivity that prevents us from offering holy things to people who are as spiritually senseless… as a wild dog.