When Georgia’s National Food Agency announced a pilot program in Batumi, Kutaisi, and Gurjaani to register, sterilize, vaccinate, and shelter nearly 9,000 stray animals, it sounded—at first glance—like an uncontroversial measure of public health. Rabies prevention, population management, animal welfare: who could argue? Yet when one looks closely, the project resonates far beyond veterinary science. It touches on some of the deepest cultural questions: how societies draw lines between the wild and the domesticated, the cared-for and the expendable, the human and the non-human.
This initiative, ostensibly technical, carries echoes of Michel Foucault’s “biopolitics”: the ways states take life itself—its reproduction, movement, and health—into their administrative grip. Stray dogs and cats are no longer just wandering presences in Georgian streets; they have become “populations” to be measured, classified, sterilized, and archived into national databases. In short, they enter the state’s field of vision not as individuals but as governable data.
From Sacred Companions to Urban Problems
Human history is entangled with the history of dogs and cats. Archaeologists date the domestication of dogs back at least 15,000 years, with burial sites in Natufian cultures showing humans interred alongside their canine companions. Cats, famously semi-domesticated, joined agricultural societies as protectors of grain against rodents. Yet their status has always been double-edged: sacred in ancient Egypt, persecuted in medieval Europe, indispensable in modern households.
Strays occupy an even more liminal position: neither wild nor properly owned. In many cultures, they become symbols of neglect, poverty, or moral disorder. In 19th-century Paris, the dogcatcher (le commissaire des chiens) was both feared and ridiculed, part of Haussmann’s broader remaking of the city into a hygienic, orderly modern capital. In today’s Bucharest, the stray dog issue sparked violent controversy, culminating in a 2013 law legalizing mass euthanasia after a child was killed. In contrast, Istanbul embraces its street dogs and cats as urban citizens in their own right, feeding them through state-provided stations and allowing them to roam freely—a model of coexistence celebrated in documentaries such as Kedi.
Georgia’s approach positions itself somewhere between these poles: neither mass extermination nor laissez-faire tolerance, but systematic medicalization.
Biopolitics on Four Legs
Sterilization programs might look like pure pragmatism, but they are also exercises in what anthropologist James C. Scott calls “legibility”: the state’s drive to make complex realities—whether forests, cities, or animal populations—manageable by simplifying them into categories and numbers. A stray is not just “a dog in the street” but becomes “unregistered reproductive potential,” a site of risk to be neutralized.
Stray dogs and cats are no longer just wandering presences in Georgian streets; they have become “populations” to be measured, classified, sterilized, and archived into national databases
Here, Foucault’s notion of biopower is instructive: modern states increasingly govern not by coercion but by fostering or restricting life processes. Registration and sterilization—these are not punishments but preventative, medical, “humane” interventions. Yet the language of humanity can conceal hierarchies: whose lives are maximized, and whose are minimized? Which animals are welcomed as pets, which as livestock, which as pests?
Cultural Mirrors: What Stray Dogs Reveal About Us
The treatment of strays often reveals more about human societies than about the animals themselves. Stray management intersects with class, space, and visibility. In affluent neighborhoods, strays may be seen as threats to order; in rural villages, they may be tolerated as semi-functional guardians or scavengers. The modern city, however, with its obsession with hygiene, branding, and tourism, has little patience for the unregulated presence of wandering animals.
Georgia, a nation negotiating between deep rural traditions and its aspirations toward European modernity, faces this symbolic challenge sharply. Will the stray dog become a reminder of disorder incompatible with Western integration, or a creature woven into the urban identity like in Istanbul?
Sanitation, Compassion, or Control?
Programs like Georgia’s inevitably raise ethical dilemmas. Is sterilization a benevolent alternative to culling, or does it reduce animals to biological units stripped of their autonomy? Does “humane management” risk masking what Giorgio Agamben called the state of exception, in which certain lives are quietly excluded from full recognition?
At the same time, public health imperatives are real: rabies kills thousands annually worldwide, primarily through dog bites. The World Health Organization supports mass sterilization and vaccination campaigns as the most sustainable solution. Here, compassion and control are not mutually exclusive but tightly interwoven.
The Future of Coexistence
The Georgian pilot project may ultimately be remembered not just for whether it succeeds in reducing strays, but for how it reshapes the cultural imagination of human-animal relations. Will citizens come to see stray dogs less as dangerous nuisances and more as part of a shared urban ecology? Or will sterilization become a symbol of invisible violence, of lives neatly managed out of sight?
History suggests that every city tells its own story through its animals. In the 21st century, where biodiversity loss and zoonotic diseases loom large, the question is not whether we control animal populations, but what kind of relationship we choose to cultivate. Georgia’s program, if read carefully, is not only about dogs and cats. It is about what kind of society Georgia imagines itself to be: one of eradication, of tolerance, or of negotiated coexistence.
By Ivan Nechaev
