BUCHAREST, Romania — President Bush's security detail has a different breed of assailant to guard against while he attends the meeting of NATO leaders here: the city's infamous stray dogs.

Special squads of dogcatchers are already stationed along the road from the airport to the Palace of the Parliament, where the meeting will be held this week, to prevent the beasts from harassing delegates on foot or nipping at the wheels of their motorcades.

Meanwhile, the rest of the city remains under a worsening canine occupation.

The city government reports that 9,000 people are bitten each year here by dogs, though those numbers include bites by strays and pets. Officials will not venture a guess at the number of strays, and estimates of the semi-feral population in the local news media range from 30,000 to 200,000 dogs.

But everyone agrees that the problem has been growing recently, thanks to a January law that prohibits the city from euthanizing the dogs. Also unable to spay or neuter the dogs and return them to the street, city officials are facing severe overcrowding at the pound and a paralysis of policing.

"Because the shelters are full, we cannot capture the dogs," Simona Panaitescu, director of the city's administration for animal supervision, said of the canine Catch-22. The city used to nab 1,500 dogs each month, according to Panaitescu, of which 80 percent were put down and 20 percent adopted.

The local debate flared up earlier this year when two women were mauled by stray dogs in separate attacks. A Japanese businessman was killed in January 2006.

The stray-dog population first exploded when the communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu demolished thousands of houses to make way for an ill-considered reconstruction plan. Residents forced to move into tiny apartments had no room for their dogs, which they then put out on the street.

Throughout Romania, dogs can be seen trotting along the sides of roads and peering from perches on trash bins, and are heard baying and barking at night.