MOSCOW, August 16 (RIA Novosti) – Bringing a dash of patriotism to the animal kingdom, Moldovan authorities ordered to have police dogs in the country only taught commands in Romanian, the country’s semi-official language.
Dogs currently used by the police and other security services in the tiny East European republic are trained in three languages: Romanian, Russian and French, local news website Publica.md reported.
But a new cooperation agreement between police in Moldova and neighboring Romania specified that only commands in Romanian are to be used, the report said late Thursday.
Moldovans and Romanians are closely related and sometimes considered the same ethnic group. The same goes for the language of Moldova, which uses the same literary standards as Romanian and is often considered a dialect of the latter.
However, while Romania was an independent country throughout most of the 20th century, Moldova was a republic in the Soviet Union, only gaining independence in 1991 and remaining on strained terms with Russia since.
The police dog order has already posed a problem for the 22 dogs currently in training at a canine training center in Moldova’s capital, Chisinau.
“Dogs’ nervous system develops at the age of one year, and if a dog was trained in one language, its reflexes adjust to commands in that language. If you speak another language to it, it just won’t understand,” senior trainer Gennady Bivol was cited by Publica.md as saying.
Another problem is that Moldova lacks books on canine training in Romanian, a problem that also plagues Romania, which also uses specialized guidebooks in languages other than the country’s official one, Bivol said.
