On January 22, in the Trans-Baikal village of Domna, a pack of stray dogs attacked a seven-year-old girl and bit her to death. The tragedy occurred in a wasteland ten meters from residential buildings. In connection with the incident, a spontaneous rally gathered near the building of the local administration. Residents have repeatedly complained about the aggression of stray animals and the uncontrolled growth of their numbers. Local officials did not take any action to solve the problem. There are no municipal shelters for homeless dogs and cats in the region, and the trapping and sterilization program is also not functioning.
Photo: Arden Arkman/Novaya
Shortly before the incident in Transbaikalia, on January 14, in the village of Arkatovo, Tver Region, stray dogs that had escaped from the enclosure where they were kept by a volunteer curator killed a six-year-old boy in front of his mother. There is one municipal shelter in Tver, designed for 100 animals. According to volunteer animal rights activists, there are more than two thousand stray dogs in the region.
In mid-November last year, a criminal case was opened in Khanty-Mansiysk Autonomous Okrug after a pack of stray dogs bit a 43-year-old woman. And in December 2021, an associate professor at the North-Eastern Federal University, Sardana Sleptsova, died in Yakutsk — she was also attacked by stray dogs. Residents of the district for several years addressed letters and petitions to representatives of the local administration, they were ignored. Now the Investigative Committee has opened criminal cases.
After the death of a girl in Transbaikalia, the head of the Investigative Committee of Russia, Alexander Bastrykin, instructed the employees of the central office to prepare proposals for improving legislation. Amendments to the legislation should provide for mechanisms to prevent attacks by stray animals and a system for monitoring the performance of duties by officials in this area with the definition of liability limits, according to the TFR website.
This is not the first legislative initiative in this matter. In 2018, the law “On Responsible Treatment of Animals and on Amendments to Certain Legislative Acts of the Russian Federation” came into force. In particular, it establishes the obligation of animal owners to provide them with proper care, prevent the appearance of unwanted offspring and adopt pets if it is not possible to take care of them.
But the main part of the livestock of neglected animals is not discarded master dogs, but generations and generations of feral mongrels born on the street.
The law regulates the treatment of homeless animals. But it works mostly on paper. Article 17 states that ill-treatment of them is unacceptable. That is, it is impossible to poison, shoot, catch and kill neglected dogs and cats. The document also states that sterilized animals without owners, having indelible or indelible marks, are not subject to capture, with the exception of aggressive individuals. The law provides for the keeping of animals without owners in a shelter until the end of their lives or the possibility of their return to their former habitats in the absence of unmotivated aggression. In reality, the problem of homeless animals is unsuccessfully trying to be solved by caring volunteers and animal rights activists, who use their own funds and donations to arrange private shelters, pay for overexposure, veterinary services for vaccination and sterilization.
As of 2021, in 16 regions of Russia there is not a single state shelter at all. It is necessary to build infrastructure there from scratch, but it is not clear who should pay for the construction of municipal shelters. Since the entry into force of the law in 2018, no funds have been allocated from the federal budget for the construction of shelters, only one-time support subsidies that partially cover the costs. Will the Tver and Ulyanovsk regions, Adygea, Kalmykia, Karachay-Cherkessia invest in shelters for homeless animals, redirecting regional budget funds from repairing roads and building kindergartens and clinics, for which there is not enough money anyway? The statistics of attacks on people by roaming packs gives an unequivocal answer to this question.
Some regions approached the problem in a savage way. In the Krasnodar Territory, where the situation with homeless animals is one of the most difficult in Russia due to the warm climate, the abundance of food resources and the long-term inaction of the regional authorities, animals are simply killed. This is rarely done by local residents who are desperate to get through to the administration. The local leadership put the murder on stream. The contractor, who in the documents equated dogs with synanthropic individuals — foxes, jackals and others — immobilizes animals with a tranquilizer dart, and then kills them. Or just poisoning with toxic substances. Often unfinished animals die in agony in front of local residents, including children. Over the past six months, only in Armavir, 496 dogs were destroyed in this way. There is a private crematorium in the region, where corpses are brought, and sometimes immobilized, but not killed animals are burned alive. There is not a single state animal shelter in the entire Krasnodar Territory, but there are more than four thousand stray dogs in Sochi alone.
