After ten years, Cyprus decided to let the strays live

Doges Editorial · 2026-07-01 · 5 min read

The Mediterranean island's parliament has voted 24 to zero to ban the euthanasia of healthy stray dogs — ending a decade of debate and reshaping what the country owes the dogs living at the edges of its towns and villages.

The vote came on a June afternoon in Nicosia. Twenty-four in favor. Zero against. Ten abstentions. When the result was announced in the House of Representatives of Cyprus, it ended nearly a decade of argument, stalled legislation, amended bills, and parliamentary sessions that had consumed the same question over and over again: what does this country owe the dogs living at the margins of its towns and villages?

The answer, as of this month, is that healthy stray dogs may no longer be euthanized simply because they are unwanted or because there is nowhere to put them. The Dogs (Amendment) Law 2026, reported by Philenews, passed Cyprus's parliament and came into force having absorbed provisions from a government bill and three separate private member proposals. It marks the most significant shift in the island's relationship with its stray dog population in at least twenty years.

A complicated history

Cyprus has never had a simple relationship with its stray dogs. In the 1980s and 1990s, facing a tapeworm crisis, authorities culled the stray population from an estimated 46,000 animals down to 6,000. The dogs on the street were not an abstract policy question — they were a real presence, animals that people named and fed and mourned, mixed with genuine public health concerns that made simple advocacy difficult.

The tapeworm was Echinococcus granulosus, which causes hydatid disease in humans: slow-growing cysts that lodge in the liver, lungs, or brain and can prove fatal if untreated. Cyprus was one of several eastern Mediterranean countries where the parasite was endemic, with free-roaming dogs as the primary transmission reservoir. A 2000 assessment published in the Revue Scientifique et Technique of the World Organisation for Animal Health documented the cull as an emergency public health measure that brought infection rates down substantially. For two decades, the lesson Cyprus drew from that history was that the problem of stray dogs was manageable through reduction.

The push for a formal ban on euthanizing healthy strays gathered legislative momentum around 2015. Greens MP Charalambos Theopemptou introduced proposals. Others followed. Draft after draft entered the parliamentary record, each time meeting delays over funding, enforcement capacity, and the central unresolved question: if healthy dogs can no longer be put down, where do they go?

That question remains unanswered. Theopemptou, who welcomed the vote in June, was direct about the law's most significant gap. Funding for five regional shelters has been discussed for years, he noted, but obstacles remain over land, construction costs, and the adequacy of allocations. He called on the next parliament to address these issues as a priority — a tacit acknowledgment that a law without shelters is, at best, a beginning.

What the law actually changes

The euthanasia provision is the headline, but the law rewrites a range of practical obligations. All dogs over two months old must now be registered. Every dog must wear a collar with a tag showing the owner's licence number and phone number. Owners who lose a dog or whose dog is stolen must notify authorities within two working days; they must report recovery within the same timeframe.

The fines were adjusted. The penalty for refusing to surrender a dog to authorities is set at €100. The fine for failing to pick up dog faeces was reduced, notably, from €300 to €100 — a small but symbolic acknowledgment that punitive measures on dog owners have not driven the behavior change policymakers were seeking.

Annual ownership fees and breeding fees per litter were increased. The law also significantly expanded the definition of "assistance dog" — now encompassing guide dogs, hearing dogs, mobility and balance support dogs, medical alert and response dogs, psychiatric support dogs, and allergen detection dogs, provided certification comes from organizations recognized by the International Guide Dog Federation or Assistance Dogs International.

Assistance dogs cost between €7,000 and €10,000, and annual licences in countries where such frameworks already exist run to around €2,000 — meaning state support will be needed for those who require them.

— MP Christos Orfanidis, during parliamentary debate, per Philenews

The party that abstained

DISY, Cyprus's largest party, abstained from the vote. The party had initially requested a postponement to give the government time to commit funding for the shelters required under the legislation, but withdrew the request after pushback from other MPs. In explaining the abstention, DISY said it did not believe the law would be implemented as written — that without the shelters, the prohibition on euthanasia would be a statement without infrastructure.

DISY abstained, saying it did not believe the law would be implemented as written.

— Philenews, reporting on the parliamentary vote

ELAM, the nationalist party, voted against the law overall but supported the specific articles on assistance dogs and the euthanasia provision — a coalition of opposites finding common ground on the narrowest point of the bill. The result was a law that passed with a striking 24-0 margin among those who voted, while the argument about whether it can work continues in the background.

A shift that took ten years

Animal welfare advocates working on this issue across the decade point to what this kind of change actually requires: not a single dramatic moment, but persistent re-tabling of the same proposal, across different parliamentary sessions, through administrations that had other priorities. The bill that finally passed in June 2026 combined work from multiple legislators over multiple years.

Theopemptou also pointed during the debate to two earlier failures: the non-enforcement of the ban on dangerous dog breeds that has been on the books since 2002, and the non-implementation of previously passed legislation on dog breeding establishments. The new law, in other words, arrives with company — other provisions that already exist on paper but have not been given the enforcement infrastructure to bite.

What comes next

What the law does immediately is make a moral statement — that healthy dogs in Cyprus have a right to live that does not depend on whether a human has formally claimed them. The global evidence base points toward Trap-Neuter-Return programs combined with mass vaccination as the most effective humane alternative to culling; the World Organisation for Animal Health identifies this approach as the recommended standard for managing free-roaming dog populations. Several northern European countries have nearly eliminated shelter euthanasia for healthy dogs through sustained investment in neutering programs, microchipping infrastructure, and public education campaigns. Cyprus's infrastructure is far from that point. Whether the shelters get built, whether the registration system is enforced, whether the fines are collected: these practical questions will determine whether the statement becomes a reality.

Cyprus is a small country, with a stray dog population that is visible and present in a way that is harder to ignore than in places where strays are rare. The people who pushed for this law over ten years were not working in abstraction. They were pushing for the dogs they saw every day — outside the bakery, sleeping in the shade by the old church, watching traffic from a patch of wasteland. Those dogs are still out there. The law has changed. The shelters have not yet been built. The next ten years will tell us more.