“Please help,” he said, according to a report in Kompas, a prominent Indonesian daily newspaper. “If you see a stray dog, just kill it, eliminate it. Don’t let them hang around spreading the disease. It’s dangerous and makes people scared.”

Bali’s government provides free medical treatment, including vaccination shots, to any resident bitten by a street dog, but the governor said the province had run out of money to buy the vaccine.

On average, more than 4,000 people a month were bitten by dogs on Bali, an island of four million people, from 2010 to 2012, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. While few of the dogs are rabid, it is not always possible to know whether one that bites is, so treatment is usually prescribed. If not treated immediately, people can die of rabies.

The governor first called on the public to kill street dogs in 2008, after rabies appeared on this island.

He did so again last July, complaining about the expense of the vaccines and noting that dog owners were violating the law by letting their pets run free.

“There is no need to catch them — put them in a shelter or something,” he said then, according to The Jakarta Post. “Just cull them. It is the dog owners’ fault for letting their dogs stray.”