In her letter Stray Dogs Are A Menace To Both Cats And Humans (April 20), Sandra Camilleri stated that the local authorities have not done anything to remove these animals from the roads.

I would like to point out to Ms Camilleri that staff members of the Animal Welfare Directorate have already been to that site five times, but unfortunately so far we have not been able to capture the offending dogs. It is not that easy to catch stray dogs who know the area so well that they can hide in places which are impossible to reach. To make matters worse, most of the construction workers in the area tend to hide the dogs when they see us arriving.

It is very disheartening to read such letters on the local newspapers; some residents in the area can actually testify that we have been to the Tigné area more than once. We have even been inside some of the construction sites in search of the dogs, however we are no miracle workers. If when going on site somebody hides the dogs so that we cannot get to them, there is little we can do about it.

With regards to the Swieqi/Pembroke area, the dogs which were creating all the chaos were captured last week by our department. Ironically this was not reported in the media, even though, in the days and weeks before, there was always some article or letter about the local authorities not doing anything about these dogs.

Regardless of the lack of gratitude of some people we will keep on working on this case until we catch these dogs.