Adopting a rescue dog from Romania

Romania is where the largest number of overseas rescue dogs coming to the UK originate, and it's the country we're adopting from ourselves — so it's the one we can speak to first-hand. Most dogs come from public shelters or the street, via UK-registered rescues that handle the paperwork and transport.

Why so many Romanian dogs need homes

Nobody knows exactly how many dogs live on Romania's streets, because there's no official count. Four Paws puts it at roughly 500,000, one of the largest stray populations in the EU. Humane Society International estimates between 500,000 and a million. HSI says many street dogs suffer from malnutrition and disease, and that dogs taken into shelters are often put down if nobody claims them.

That last part has a history. In September 2013, days after a four-year-old boy was killed by a pack of stray dogs in Bucharest, Romania's parliament passed a law letting local authorities euthanise dogs that hadn't been adopted or claimed after 14 working days in a public shelter. Animal welfare groups protested in the chamber as the vote went through. Four Paws said in 2023 that killing strays is still legal and frequently practised in Romania, "without lasting results but with enormous suffering".

Public shelters are where many dogs end up. In January 2026, Four Paws investigators visited nine of them and reported "systemic neglect":

overcrowded, dirty kennels and dogs with untreated open wounds
frozen water buckets in half the shelters they visited
dogs that weren't routinely vaccinated against rabies or neutered
at one shelter run as no-kill, about 40% of its 1,035 dogs died in 2024

Behind all of that is a population that keeps replacing itself while dogs aren't neutered, which is why welfare groups argue for catch-neuter-vaccinate-return programmes instead of mass sheltering and culling. Romanian vets, volunteers and councils are part of that work too. HSI runs free neutering and vaccination clinics with Ilfov County Council, near Bucharest.

Adopting one dog doesn't fix any of this, and it isn't meant to. But for that one dog, it changes everything. Barnie was found as a tiny puppy, one of a litter, behind a supermarket, and grew up in a shelter. He's the reason this site exists. If you can't adopt, sharing a rescue's dogs, fostering, or giving to a registered rescue all help, and so does supporting neutering work in Romania itself.

Getting a Romanian dog to the UK

Romania is an EU country, so the entry requirements are the standard ones — microchip, rabies vaccination, a 21-day wait, and tapeworm treatment before arrival. See the rabies and 21-day guide for the timeline. Dogs usually travel by road, a multi-day haul across Europe; read transport day for what arrival is like. Because rescue dogs are imported under commercial rules, your dog must be delivered to the address on its paperwork, not collected from a car park or services, and must stay there for at least 48 hours.

The health tests that matter

Brucella canis is the headline concern for Eastern European dogs: it's considered endemic in Eastern Europe, and ESCCAP UK & Ireland has called for testing of dogs imported from endemic countries to be made compulsory. In a 2023 study of imported dogs published in Veterinary Record, 24% carried at least one exotic pathogen, and Leishmania was found most often in dogs with Romanian-origin microchips — so a full imported-dog blood panel (Brucella, Leishmania, Ehrlichia, Babesia, heartworm) is worth discussing with your vet.

The dogs

Romanian rescue dogs are overwhelmingly mixed-breed shelter and street dogs of every size and age, rather than a particular breed type. The DNA-testing company Embark even reports a distinct ancestry category for them, the Romanian Village Dog, which it describes as free-ranging, free-breeding dogs descended from the region's founding dog populations rather than from modern breeds.

Romania's native breeds

Romania is also home to large shepherd breeds, developed over centuries to guard flocks in the Carpathian mountains. If your dog looks like a shepherd type, these are the breeds worth knowing about. What follows is how each breed's official FCI standard describes it, not a prediction about your dog.

Breed	Standard size (height at shoulder)	Typical look	Bred for
Romanian Carpathian Shepherd	Males 65–73 cm, females 59–67 cm	Wolf-like head; wolf-grey coat, pale fawn overlaid with black	Defending the herds, and an excellent guard dog
Romanian Mioritic Shepherd	Males at least 70 cm, females at least 65 cm	Long, abundant coat; white with black or grey patches, or solid white or grey	Herding and guarding; "wary of strangers"
Romanian Bucovina Shepherd	Males 68–78 cm, females 64–72 cm	White or white-beige with grey or black patches; a mane at the neck	Guarding flocks; "a strong bark", patrolling at night

A fourth native breed, the Romanian Raven Shepherd, is named for its mostly black coat ("corb" means raven in Romanian) and comes from the Carpathian and sub-Carpathian regions.

All four were bred to guard livestock. The FCI standards describe the three recognised breeds as calm and stable, and also as guardians: "a natural guardian" (Carpathian), "wary of strangers" (Mioritic), and a dog whose bark is "very strong" when strangers approach and who patrols at night (Bucovina). That's useful background if you're wondering where watchfulness or night-time barking comes from during the first three weeks, but it's never a reason to assume anything about an individual dog.