Picture and text by Victor Yanulevich
An old woman has died from rabies, two months after having been bitten by a stray cat in 2007. It is the first fatal case in the Voronezh area in the last thirteen years, a journalist from ROSPOTREBNADZOR reported to RIA News.
In the town of Verkhnyaya Salda in the Sverdlovsk area, there has been an outbreak of dogs attacking people. For the month of July 2006, twelve people were bitten, and for the first six months more than one hundred people were attacked. The last being a three month old baby.
In Vladivostok, guard dogs attacked passers-by, and in Tomsk a man lost both legs after being savaged by four dogs on the evening of the 6th April 2006. In Chelyabinsk a six year old girl died of rabies after a dog bite. In the capital during 2004, twenty-seven thousand, three hundred and sixty-eight people were bitten by dogs, the Association of Veterinary Science in Moscow told the media in 2006.
During one week in September 2005 in Kazan, stray dogs killed three people. Four deaths have been reported in the Astrakhan area. The statistics of guard dogs attacking people are supplemented by attacks by rabid strays roaming the cities.
The Russian mass-media are constantly publishing stories of shoppers carrying bags of provisions being attacked by dog packs. These packs tend to pick out women, children and the elderly and other more vulnerable members of society. According to Dr. Boris Samoilov, editor-in-chief of the Red Book of Moscow, stray dogs have destroyed nearly all the wildlife in the capital and the situation is close to critical.
These stray dogs carry a variety of infections. Even a small bite can transmit rabies and mutilation, loss of limbs and even death can occur from infected animals. The dogs are cross-breeds. The result of domestic animals abandoned by their owners that have developed into feral animals with the cunning, aggression and pack instinct to survive in the city.
In the autumn of 2006, the Moscow City Duma (Moscow's parliament) presented a bill titled "The Maintenance of Pets in the City", which should provide a grading system for breeds of dog considered "dangerous to human life in Moscow". This would mean restrictions on breeds such as fight rottweilers and other dogs used mainly as guard dogs as they have become the most common dogs responsible for the frequent attacks on people.
The statistics quote that 80-90% of attacks on people are from guard dogs or strays. And the number of feral cats and dogs in the city grows steadily. According to the Department of Housing and Communal Services, a shelter with places for twenty-two thousand animals will be opened. There are plans to open twelve more such pounds. Five thousand strays are already in shelters.
Already there are upwards of twenty-five thousand stray animals roaming Moscow and every year the figure grows by about five thousand. If caught, these animals are sterilized. A moratorium was called on the shooting of strays in Moscow more than eight years ago, but the problem of the strays was still a concern. Deputies of Moscow City Council have been told that, over the past two years, the number of complaints regarding dog packs terrorizing streets and public areas has grown sharply.
In early summer 2005, state health officer Gennady Onishchenko, signed a bill "to strengthen legislation to restrict the spread of rabies in Russia". The document admitted that in certain regions in Russia, rabies had reached epidemic proportions during 2005.
The result of the government's ill-informed programme of sterilization has not justified itself. It is estimated that there are one hundred thousand stray dogs on the Moscow streets. The workload of the dog catchers has become simply intolerable.
Thousands of Muscovites have repeatedly contacted the authorities and the mayor of Moscow, Yury Luzhkov, with complaints about the cruel treatment of, and requests for help with, these animals. But if a reply was received it was usually a refusal or an official letter outlining the Department of City Wildlife (Department of Housing and Communal Services) "Humane Policy of Sterilization of Stray Animals". Nothing has been done.
In the Russian media, the Department of City Wildlife have conducted a "disinformation" campaign regarding the success of the sterilization programme and the presence in Moscow of normally functioning animal pounds.
In the capital alone, it is estimated that tens of millions of roubles of budgetary money is spent on the treatment of those who have been attacked by the animals. Approximately thirty-five million roubles are allocated from the Moscow budget to deal with the problem of strays, but the utilization of these means cannot be checked. The harm done to the community when so many people have been injured and killed by feral animals is measureless.
Video monitoring has also shown that the number of stray cats is as great as the number of stray dogs. They suffer from the usual injuries of feral living as well as being victims of human cruelty resulting in torture and death. In 2004, it was revealed in Moscow that the captured strays were killed rather than sterilized.
On the 6th April 2004, in the Moscow City Duma, the results of the Commission on Municipal Economy were subject to checks by the Control and Accounts Chamber of Moscow. The effective utilization of funds directed to the regulation and maintenance of strays, were to be considered.
As the press centre of the Moscow City Government has reported; the City Management Department, the Prefectures of the Eastern, Western and Southern Administrative Districts, the State Unitary Enterprise for the "catching of wild animals", the company Zoo Service Ltd., and the city's animal sanctuaries; have all come under the financial scrutiny of the auditors of the Control and Accounts Chamber of the Moscow government.
In June 2005, the All-Russia Centre for the Study of Public Opinion (VCIOM) (www.wciom.com) led the questioning of experts from the trustees of Moscow's stray cat population, regarding the position of these animals. The results showed that the main cause of death amongst the cats was attack from stray dogs.
Under the European Convention on the Protection of Animals wrote, few russian non government organizations in 2004 sent a letters to former President Vladimir Putin, former Chairman of the Government of Russia Michael Fradkov, Yury Luzhkov the Mayor of Moscow and the Commission of Human Rights: "the reduction of the number of neglected dogs and cats by their sterilization is not humane to animals and does not allow reduction of numbers. Thereby contradicting the purposes of the application and is one of the bases for cancelling the programme".
The European Convention on the Protection of Animals states; "If the state considers that the number of stray animals represents a problem it should take the legislative and/or administrative measures necessary to decrease their number in ways that will not cause pain or suffering".
