Kazakhstan: Stray Population Management Policy and Legislation

For a long time, the only way of regulating the number of stray animals in Kazakhstan was killing them. Starting from the 2010s, an increasingly powerful animal protection movement gradually fought through several legislative changes aimed at improving the welfare of stray dogs throughout the process of capturing, post-capture maintenance and culling. Finally, this animal protection wave resulted in the enactment in late 2021 of a new Law on Responsible Treatment of Animals. The Law, together with the accompanying changes to other legislative acts, could have led to a drastic change in stray welfare through the application of the Trap-Neuter-Vaccination-Release (TNVR) policy. However, this did not occur. This chapter analyzes the current state of Kazakhstan’s legislation on stray population management, the changes it introduces in comparison with the previous legislation as well as the defects, which hinder the full-scale implementation of the TNVR policy. The chapter will also address the question of potential changes, which the legislation should incorporate in order to control the stray population more effectively and more humanely.