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ESSENTIAL DESTINATIONS

MONTH: May 2008

The $64 million question: is Moscow building new shelters promised in 1999?

 

MOSCOW--"Moscow Dog Attacks Spur $64 Million Castration Drive," the international financial news web site Bloomberg.com bannered on April 14, 2008.

The headline, in a publication founded by New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, seemed to promise the largest dog sterilization campaign anywhere, ever.

Bloomberg.com Moscow correspondent Henry Meyer reiterated in the lead paragraph of his article that the $64 million would be spent "to castrate as many as 50,000 stray dogs," in response to dog attacks now occurring at about an eighth of the U.S. rate.

But reality--as Meyer acknowledged five paragraphs later--is that Moscow chief veterinarian Natalia Sokolova told a television audience that the city plans to spend the $64 million to build 15 animal shelters, meant to impound about 2,000 stray dogs apiece per year. The shelters are to be opened in 2009, ten years after they were first promised.

According to Meyer, "A Soviet-era policy of shooting homeless animals was abandoned in 2002. Mayor Yuri Luzhkov, under pressure from animal-rights groups to uphold the ban, has now decided on a two-year program to stop the dogs from breeding."

Meyer in his last paragraph claimed to have interviewed"Irina Novozhilova, head of the Moscow-based animal-rights group VITA," but VITA newsletters give quite a different picture of the long effort to bring Moscow animal control up to world standards.

Dog-shooting was abandoned in 1999 and the dog sterilization program was officially introduced instead in October 2002, according to VITA. The program was supposed to sterilize 80% of the female dogs in Moscow, as well as building shelters, but got off to a creeping start, leading to an official proposal in 2005 to restart shooting dogs.

VITA mobilized opposition, and publicized what needed to be done. Nonprofit programs sterilized and vaccinated dogs while the city program faltered. City dogcatchers, especially in the Northeastern Administrative District of Moscow, under prefect Irina Raber, responded by repeatedly capturing dogs who had already been treated.

"The very first of those attempts was stopped by the regional public prosecutor in June 2004," VITA recounted in 2006, but "the Northeastern District managed to send to the rendering plant 98 tons of animal corpses during just the first half of 2005, with perfect
impunity, while killing dogs and cats in the capital territory is forbidden."

Charged VITA, "The dog-catchers do not want to prevent breeding of street animals, because each new animal on the street means earnings."

Attempts to sabotage nonprofit pro-animal initiatives have gone far beyond non-cooperation, VITA reported in March 2008, celebrating that a spurious criminal case against Bimi Charity Fund for Animals president Daria Taraskina was dropped, six months after VITA undertook a media campaign and appealed to the governor of the Moscow region on her behalf. Taraskina heads a shelter in Tomilinsky, a Moscow suburb, opened in 1989 by the Charitable Society Rus.

In 2000, VITA recalled, this shelter "was left without management and means of subsistence when all of its administrators died in a dreadful traffic accident. The dogs spent four days in the heat without water or food. Taraskina, managing two other shelters at that time, took charge. In seven years of Taraskina's management the shelter underwent a complete restoration."

In August 2007, however, road access to the shelter was barricaded, the road was dug up, the shelter was repeatedly raided by police, and Taraskina was eventually charged with facilitating illegal immigration.

"Someone," as yet unidentified, "liked the place where the shelter is situated and was trying to get possession of it," guessed VITA president Novozhilova.