Charlie Matthias

AN Islington vet has celebrated 10 years of international “knowledge sharing” to improve dog welfare.

Charlie Matthias, from Highbury, is a senior veterinary surgeon working for the charity Dogs Trust in Angel. Recently he visited Bosnia and Herzegovina as part of a training programme to improve dog welfare in the capital city, Sarajevo.

The Balkan country has long struggled with a significant stray dog population, with more than 12,000 dogs roaming the streets of Sarajevo in 2012. In the past decade Dogs Trust helped vets across Bosnia run a neutering and vaccination programme to improve the welfare of street dogs.

A Bosnian street dog

At the last survey in 2019, data suggested the programme was working, with only 3,000 stray dogs still living on the streets.

“Knowledge sharing is always great. I learned lots of things from the Bosnian vets I worked with about certain diseases we don’t get over in the UK,” Mr Matthias said. “Knowledge sharing is always important.”

Mr Matthias taught a range of techniques to the vets he was working alongside, including surgery and anaesthesia.

“The important thing to stress is it’s not a saviour complex about training up Bosnian vets. They’re good vets and competent vets but if we’re going to be funding neutering programmes we need to be sure they’re following high-welfare programmes as if they were UK dogs,” he said.

The vets in Bosnia. Photo: Dogs Trust

Mr Matthias added that the programme ensured dogs that have been vaccinated and neutered were cared for after their operations. They are then allowed back onto the streets.

“While everyone would like there not to be a problem with street dogs in Bosnia the solution is not to put them into shelters – that’s why we’re doing high-welfare surgical neutering,” he said.

“We know stray dogs can live quite happy lives, often they’ve grown up on the streets and are happy with what they know.

“I felt really proud of the work that we were doing out there – the impact we’ve made is amazing. When we started there it was very common to see stray dogs on the street, and now we have significantly reduced the stray dog population on the streets.”