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ESSENTIAL DESTINATIONS

MONTH: June 2006

St. Petersburg G8 Summit meet
brings war against street dogs

ST. PETERSBURG––Tight security precautions for the G8 Summit to be held in St. Petersburg, Russia, July 15-17, include “exterminating street animals with utmost cruelty,” Baltic Care of Animals members Elena Bobrova, Marina Ermakova, Svetlana Los, and Tatiana Goritcheva alleged in a June 2 joint statement relayed to western media by North Kent Animal Welfare founder Mark Johnson, of Britain.


The BCA members’ joint statement echoed and amplified exposés by St. Petersburg journalists Yelena Andreyeva and Galina Stolyarova, published on December 2, 2005 by the St. Petersburg Times and on May 5, 2006 by PetersburgCity.


The extermination effort is administered by the waste disposal firm SPETSTRANS, the BCA members stated. “Spetstrans staff kill street animals on the spot using dithylinum (succinyl choline), a powerful curare type poison,” which “paralyzes the respiratory system, so the animal dies slowly and silently of asphyxiation, experiencing great suffering and agony, which may last up to an hour.”


Paralytic drugs are not listed by the American Veterinary Medical Association’s 2003 Report on Euthanasia (the most recent edition) as an acceptable method of killing animals. A variety of references on killing laboratory animals, published for the guidance of laboratory technicians and Institutional Animal Care & Use Committees in accordance with the U.S. Animal Welfare Act, agree that succinyl choline is acceptably used as a killing agent only if the animal is already under deep general anesthesia.


“The corpses of animals are then taken to the Municipal Veterinary Center at 2nd Zhernovskaya Street,” said the BCA menbers. “Here,” they alleged, “animals still alive will be burned alive. Spetstrans employees are stingy with their poison,” the BCA members charged, “so they will not expend it on puppies, instead cracking their heads open against a wall or cutting their throats. They catch cats with baited hooks, and then pull their entrails out. The city’s animal rights activists have photographs and eyewitness accounts to prove this,” the BCA statement claimed.


The practice of catching small carnivores with baited hooks is commonly used in “denning” by USDA Wildlife Services trappers, in which the object is to draw a hidden litter out of a hole to ensure that all are killed.


“Animal rights activists in September 2005 finally convinced city hall to adopt a policy on stray animals that replaces extermination with sterilization, pounds, and returning animals to their former habitats after social adaptation,” the BCA members recounted. “But the policy exists on paper only. According to an action plan finalized on January 16, 2006, extermination of homeless animals will continue until mid-July,” after the G8 Summit.
“The city has earmarked 2,237,000 rubles, approximately $83,000, more this year for animal extermination, but not a penny will be available for sterilization,” the BCA members charged.


“Although City Hall adopted a sterilization plan for stray animals in September 2005, no funding has yet been allocated,” confirmed Stolyarova.


“The last massive extermination campaign,” the BCA members recalled, “was waged in the run-up to St. Petersburg’s 300th anniversary in 2003, when poisoned bait was scattered in the neighborhoods where vagrant animals had been spotted. At the moment,” the BCA members noted, “there is an emergency rat extermination campaign underway in St. Petersburg, also killing many cats and dogs, both strays and pets.”


Wrote Andreyeva, “According to Yury Andreyev, St. Petersburg’s chief veterinary surgeon, of a total of 250,000 dogs in the city, 10,000 are homeless. Others put the homeless count as high as 20,000.”


BCA member Bobrova estimated that St. Petersburg kills 4,000 to 6,000 dogs per year. “By killing stray animals,” the BCA members contend, “City Hall violates Article 245 of the Penal Code, Articles 137, 230 and 231 of the Civil Code, the Federal Fauna Act, and even the municipal directive of January 15, 1998 Re: Controlling and Keeping Homeless Animals in St. Petersburg.”


The activists said they and others had repeatedly cited the relevant laws in “appeals to the President of Russia, the Governor of St. Petersburg, and the Prosec-utor General’s Office, but all complaints and petitions always bounce back to a lower authority, so all replies come from the Veter-inary Authority or the Improvement Commit-tee,” who are responsible for the killing.


Baltic Care of Animals provides free dog and cat sterilization through several cooperating veterinarians, “but then the exterminators come and butcher animals who have already been sterilized,” the four women said.


Bobrova told Andreyeva that BCA veterinarian Yury Mikityuk “has sterilized 200 strays, and the organization itself has carried out 100 sterilization operations every month for the past three years,” but more than half of the sterilized dogs were later killed by animal control contractors.


“From July through September 2005,” the four BCA members’ joint statement added, “a non-governmental organization called the Society for the Revival of Mercy collected upward of 20,000 petition signatures demanding that animal control employees act in accordance with the law. The authorities simply ignored the petition.”


The BCA members provided detailed descriptions of massacres of sterilized, vaccinated, and identification-tagged dogs allegedly conducted by SPETSTRANS at Makarov Naval Engineering Academy on February 11, 2006, and a subway station on February 18, 2006. The BCA members also furnished a copy of coverage of the latter by the St. Petersburg newspaper Smena.


“In Russia there is no history of legislation protecting animals,” summarized Stolyarova. “A federal law passed by the State Duma in 1999 was vetoed by ex-president Boris Yeltsin on the grounds that the document ‘was lacking a subject.’ The Moscow City Duma has been debating the issue for three years without any tangible results.


“Igor Rimmer, deputy head of the Judicial Commission of the St. Petersburg Legislative Assembly, has recommended studying the western experience of special police task forces dealing with crimes committed against animals,” Stolyarova added. “According to statistics collected by the Moscow-based Serbsky Institute for Forensic Psychiatry, 85 percent of prisoners serving terms for murders and other severe crimes were reported as having tortured animals.


“At present,” finished Stolyarova, “there are no state-run shelters for lost or stray animals in St. Petersburg. The several small shelters funded by local charities are unable to deal with the scale of the problem.”


“There is not a single animal pound in St. Petersburg, a city of five million,” affirmed the BCA members. “We have fear that a pound City Hall has promised to open at Bolshoi Smolensky Prospekt will operate as an extermination facility.


“The Veterinary Authority is unapologetic,” the BC members alleged. “The head, Yuri Andreev, “was quoted in the Sankt-Peterburgskie Vedomosti newspaper on February 15 as saying, “Veterinary medicine is not for animals; it’s for people.”