You're reading: Ukraine’s stray dog problem in spotlight

Editor’s Note: The Kyiv Post’s weekly Euro 2012 page looks forward to the soccer tournament that Ukraine will co-host with Poland from June 8 to July 1. We will cover information for fans, visitors and people who live in Ukraine, including travel tips, interviews, coverage of the teams competing and information on preparations for the championship.

Pictures of stray animals killed cruelly in Ukraine provoked a huge international campaign last year, including a call by animal rights activists to cancel the Euro 2012 football championships if the authorities didn’t stop the slaughter.

Local authorities have invented cruel ways of solving Ukraine’s overpopulation of stray animals that roam the streets, including mobile incinerators in Lugansk Oblast’s Lysychansk, where some animals were burned alive. Others are simply beaten to death, hanged to death from hooks, shot dead or poisoned.

Many Western nations, including the United States, use a combination of sterilization and humane euthanization to reduce the population of homeless or dangerous animals.

Ecology Minister Mykola Zlochevsky wrote in late November to local authorities, calling on them to stop the killing, at least ahead of the Euro 2012 championship, but several months later he admitted the killing continues.

In fact, one leading animal-rights activist says that the killing continues unabated.

“All mayors, apart from heads of Kyiv, Odesa and Lutsk, are supporting animal killings,” said Asia Serpinska, president of the Association of Animal Protection Organizations of Ukraine. “It is still going on.”

Officials say there are 20,000 stray animals in Kyiv, with thousands more in other large cities. Most of them are abandoned pets; many more were born on the street.

Ukrainian law allows the killing of abandoned animals in shelters if no one claims them within five days after being caught on the streets.
Officials from the Union of European Football Associations – the organizer of Euro 2012 – say Ukraine’s inability to humanely control its stray animal population is creating headaches.

“Everyone’s talking about it. My 13-year-old godchild wrote me recently, asking whether I couldn’t straighten it out, [as] she’d seen very bad pictures of dog killings on Facebook,” Martin Kallen, tournament director of Euro 2012 in Poland and Ukraine, recently said in an interview with Switzerland’s Berner Zeitung newspaper. He said, however, that it wasn’t his job to “turn life in Ukraine upside down.”

Some Europeans decided to take action for a long-range solution.
Austria-based Vier Pfoten International on Feb. 3 announced a four-month program to sterilize stray animals in Kyiv, Kharkiv, Lviv and Donetsk, the four cities that will host Euro 2012.

The six mobile veterinary clinics that cost 50,000 euros each will travel to the four host cities carrying the Austrian veterinarians to perform sterilization and treatment.

However, that won’t stop the animals from facing an inhumane death.

In Kyiv, many stray animals “are still dying every day” in agony from poison placed on the streets by local communal services and city dwellers, according to
Tamara Tarnavska, director and founder of the private SOS animal shelter in Pirogovo near Kyiv.

In September, Zlochevsky promised to allocate Hr 6 million to renovate the SOS shelter to double the number of animals it can accommodate to 4,000. However, city officials have yet to grant them the needed land.

“They don’t give a damn about this problem,” Tarnavska said.

The government had planned to allocate Hr 30 million in 2012 for the building of about 200 new shelters for stray animals across Ukraine to be run by animal rights activists. But Tarnavska doubts Ukrainian animal protection groups will see any money. She said her shelter received less than one-tenth of Hr 100,000 promised her in 2011 by Kyiv authorities.

There is a compelling safety reason to control the population of stray animals. Besides diseases that they can spread, some dogs are simply dangerous – biting, and even killing, people.

But the animal rights activists call killing an inhumane and an ineffective way of reducing the number of stray animals.
The overpopulation of stray animals is also fueled by irresponsible pet owners.

“The owners drive away, abandon or resettle, leaving their four-legged friends,” said Oleh Kachkan, director of the Kyiv State Center for the Identification of
Animals, adding that up to 70 percent of stray animals in Kyiv are the former pets.

Kyiv Post staff writer Oksana Grytsenko can be reached at [email protected].