  We report on a study of pi and eta decays of strange baryon resonances within
relativistic constituent-quark models based on one-gluon-exchange and
Goldstone-boson-exchange dynamics. The investigations are performed in the
point form of Poincare-invariant relativistic quantum mechanics with a
spectator-model decay operator. The covariant predictions of the
constituent-quark models underestimate the experimental data in most cases.
These findings are congruent with an earlier study of nonstrange baryon decays
in the light-flavor sector. We also consider a nonrelativistic reduction of the
point-form spectator model, which leads to the decay operator of the elementary
emission model. For some decays the nonrelativistic results differ
substantially from the relativistic ones and they exhibit no uniform behavior
as they scatter above and below the experimental decay widths.
