A pack of stray dogs are likely to be put down in southern Sicily after they attacked and killed a ten-year-old boy and injured two other people on Sunday.
Police had already rounded up 30 of the animals Monday and were looking for the remaining members of the 50-strong pack.
The boy had been cycling past the dogs when they surrounded him and pulled him off his bike, hours after two separate incidents in which a nine-year-old boy and a forty-year-old man were also bitten.
Animal rights organisations on Monday appealed for the animals to be spared.
''It is not by killing the dogs or staging the umpteenth hunt that the problem will be resolved,'' said Lorenzo Croce, the head of the Italian Association for the Defence of Animals and the Environment (AIDAA), noting that there are 450,000 stray dogs in Italy, largely in the south of the country.
Croce said around 1,600 town councils ''systematically ignore'' laws requiring them to take responsibility for rounding up strays and accommodating them in public kennels.
Welfare Undersecretary Francesca Martini echoed Croce's complaint and singled out local authorities in the south of Italy, who she said are failing to channel funds into respecting the law.
''Stray dogs are an extremely serious problem for health and public safety and the lack of investment by town councils in the collection, microchipping and recovery of strays is becoming an equally serious problem,'' she said.
''Sicily is well known both for extremely serious problems with stray dogs and unfortunately with animal cruelty,'' she added, saying she had asked for an emergency meeting with the region's health chief Massimo Russo.
The mayor of Scicli, the town where the attack took place, hit back at criticism.
Giovanni Venticinque argued that the dogs ''were not strays'' but had been legally entrusted to a private citizen.
A 64-year-old man who had been granted 'custody' of the pack was arrested Sunday in connection with the boy's death.
The mayor admitted that the town was not equipped with public kennels but said the council did not have sufficient funds to build the structure.
