Dear friends,
We are looking for moral support/ Please, help us to stop the
genocide of stray animals in St.Petersburg. You will understand
everything from this text.
Yours sincerely
Marina Ermakova
региональная
благотворительная
экологическая
общественная
организация
БАЛТИЙСКАЯ
ЗАБОТА О ЖИВОТНЫХ
regional charitable
ecological organisation
BALTIC CARE OF ANIMALS
Dear Presidents and Prime Ministers of G8 Member Nations,
The summit of the eight most industrialized nations of the world
is coming to St. Petersburg in July, and a good thing, too: St.
Petersburg is rightfully considered one of the world’s most
magnificent cities. For any city, it is a great honor to host
such a high-profile event. Perhaps it would interest you to know
how St. Petersburg is preparing for the summit.
In the run-up to the July summit, St. Petersburg authorities are
exterminating street animals – both strays and not –
with utmost cruelty. The effort is administered by Spetstrans,
a government-run unitary company that reports to City Hall’s
Committee on Roads and Improvement. Spetstrans staffers exterminate
street animals on the spot using dithylinum (succinyl choline),
a powerful curare type poison banned everywhere in the civilized
world. Dithylinum 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. The corpses of animals
are then taken to the Municipal Veterinary Center at 2nd Zhernovskaya
Street. Here, if the animal is still alive, it will be burned
alive. Spetstrans employees are stingy with their poison, so they
will not expend it on puppies, instead cracking their heads open
against a wall or cutting their throats with some wire. 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. Officials at the Improvement Committee
describe this procedure callously as “animal control.”
Extermination is today the only way of dealing with stray animals
practiced by the government.
After many years of fighting cruelty towards animals, animal rights
activists in September 2005 finally convinced St. Petersburg City
Hall to adopt a Policy on Stray Animals in St. Petersburg, replacing
extermination with more humane control methods such as sterilization,
pounds, and returning animals to their former habitats after social
adaptation. But the Policy exists on paper only; in reality merciless
extermination of homeless animals, far from abating, is gaining
momentum. The Action Plan, finalized on 16 January 2006, was supposed
to follow up on the Policy, but in fact fully contradicted it.
According to this plan, extermination of homeless animals will
continue until mid-July, which is when the summit is scheduled.
The city has earmarked 2,237,000 rubles (approx. USD 83,000.00)
more this year for animal extermination under the guise of “control”
than last year, but not a penny will be available for sterilization.
There is no doubt that when Spetstrans is through with its carnage,
ostensibly to “clean up” the city for the G8 Summit,
there will be no homeless animals left to sterilize. The last
massive extermination campaign 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, there is an emergency rat extermination
campaign underway in St. Petersburg, killing many cats and dogs,
both strays and pets, as a side effect. In fact, the hidden agenda
behind the whole campaign was to exterminate stray cats and dogs
as well as rats. The city’s animal rights groups have received
numerous reports of cats and dogs killed by rat exterminators.
There is not a single animal pound in St. Petersburg, a city of
five million, because such is the government’s policy. Indeed,
why do we need pounds when we can kill the animal on the spot?
We have every reason to fear that the pound they’ve promised
to open at Bolshoi Smolensky Prospekt will also operate as an
extermination facility, because those officials in whose hands
the destiny of homeless animals was placed by law, treat them,
as “dangerous biological waste,” to quote their official
communications. They think that when they kill strays, they are
simply “cleaning up” the city. The Veterinary Authority
is also unapologetic. Its head, Mr. Yuri Andreev, is a proud animal
hater who makes no effort to hide how much he hates homeless animals,
saying love to him is “too sacred and lofty a feeling to
be wasted on an animal.” “Veterinary medicine is not
for animals; it’s for people,” he was also quoted
as saying by Sankt-Peterburgskie Vedomosti newspaper on February
15.
But homeless animals are our equals in distress; it’s the
duty of every human being to help them in every way. It’s
the fault of human beings that animals find themselves on the
street in the first place, and to kill them for it is the apotheosis
of cruelty. We are fully convinced that extermination of vagrant
animals by any other name, be it “cleanup” or “control,”
is nothing short of human fascism, the cruel vanity of human beings
considering themselves superior to other life forms.
But the moral aspect aside, there is a legal dimension to what
is going on. By killing stray animals, 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 15 January 1998 Re: Controlling and Keeping Homeless Animals
in St. Petersburg. The city’s animal rights groups and private
individuals have repeatedly questioned the practices of City Hall’s
Improvement Committee, the Spetstrans company that reports to
it, and the Veterinary Authority in their appeals to the President
of Russia, the Governor of St. Petersburg, and the Prosecutor
General’s Office, but all complaints and petitions always
bounce back to a lower-rung authority, so all replies come from
the Veterinary Authority or the Improvement Committee.
The Prosecutor General’s and St. Petersburg Prosecutor’s
Office choose not to intervene. When authorities themselves break
the law, private individuals can get away with virtually any crime
against animals. Here is one example:
At the Leningrad District Military Hospital at 17 Petergovskoye
shosse Highway in Petrodvorets, animals are butchered routinely.
Private A. Mareev, while being treated at that hospital, tortured
Malysh, an 8-month-old puppy living on the hospital compound,
in the most sick, sadistic way. In the presence of eyewitnesses,
he cut the puppy’s ears and tail off, then cut his throat
open, and finally burned the puppy alive in the furnace. In May
2005, Lt. Col. Oleg Demchuk, an MD, ordered his subordinates to
burn all the cats on the compound alive. On 3 January 2006, Captain
Maksim Udintsev, who is responsible for “cleanup”
on the hospital compound, hurled four one-and-a-half-month-old
puppies into a furnace alive in front of eyewitnesses. The puppies
had been born to the hospital guard dog. All this was described
in detail in the article Sadism Behind a Concrete Fence, published
in the Chas Pik weekly Issue #2 on 18-24 January 2006 (a photocopy
is enclosed). The Prosecutor’s Office declined to prosecute
this case under Article 245 of the Russian Penal Code, Cruelty
Towards Animals.
The paradox of free speech as different from, say, Soviet-style
censorship, is that, yes, we can openly talk and write about things,
but nothing ever changes. Instances of callous extermination of
animals are reported in newspapers, on radio and TV; environmentalists
and rights activists hold rallies, but animals continue to be
barbarically slaughtered every day.
In a grassroots initiative, people have begun to have stray animals
neutered and spayed independently (this service is provided free
of charge by veterinarians who are partners of an environmental
NGO called Baltic Animal Care). But then the exterminators come
and butcher animals who have already been sterilized.
In July through September 2005, a non-governmental organization
call the Society for the Revival of Mercy collected upwards of
20,000 signatures under a petition addressed to St. Petersburg
City Hall, demanding that animal control employees act in accordance
with the law. The authorities simply ignored the petition, and
the carnage continues unabated. This we see as a blatant human
rights violation. Municipal authorities openly disregard the law
and public opinion, and get away with it.
Here are two typical examples.
Two small groups of socially trained dogs used to live near the
Ulitsa Dybenko and Prospekt Bolshevikov Metro stations. The group
by Ulitsa Dybenko was taken care of by some retired women, survivors
of the 1941-1944 Siege of Leningrad. The dogs had been neutered
and spayed and were wearing special tags in their ears, saying
they were sterile. They all had names, and wore collars. They
never showed the slightest aggression. The evening of February
18th, the Eve of the Epiphany in the Orthodox Christian calendar,
when the temperature was 25 below zero, the dogs were allowed
inside the Metro station to keep warm. The station manager called
the “animal control” service, and the animals were
slaughtered inside the station right in front of passengers, including
children.
When the old women came by the next morning and found their pets
gone, they were told the dogs had been taken by animal control.
The morning of February 19, one of them, Galina Abramenko, called
the “animal control” service (at that point, she was
unaware of what “animal control” really means) and
asked them to return the dogs for money. She was told the dogs
were dead. When she asked for the dogs’ bodies so she could
bury them, she was told the bodies had been “recycled.”
This incident was reported in the Smena newspaper, and a copy
of the article is attached. The old women proceeded to complain
to the Governor, the President, and the Prosecutor’s Office,
but all they got in return were terse, non-committal replies from
the Veterinary Authority.
On February 11, “animal control” employees Denis Isaev,
Pavel Kozelchenko and Aadrei Yanushkov killed eight dogs and several
puppies on the compound of the Makarov Naval Engineering Academy
in the presence of Anatoly Shishkunov, who loved those dogs and
took care of them. He had come to feed the dogs that day. Just
imagine, these butchers began shooting the dogs leaving them to
die a painful death. The old man begged them to at least spare
the female dogs and puppies, but instead they called the police
on Shishkunov because he was interfering with their “work.”
The carnage was overseen by Captain Andrei Bakurov, who is a professor
at the academy. A total of twenty dogs were killed on the academy
compound that day. The academy buildings are located next to Konstantinovsky
Palace, the Summit venue. In that neighborhood, everything that
moves is being exterminated at the moment.
These examples are just a drop in the sea. Animals are killed
every day in this city. The question is: who benefits from this?
In St. Petersburg, officials are motivated to kill animals because
the city pays them huge amount of money to do it. It is also in
their interest to have animals to kill. That’s why St. Petersburg
does not want to follow suit with Moscow, where humane treatment
of animals is not merely a declaration, but reality. In other
cities across Russia, homeless animals are even worse off than
in St. Petersburg. Russia absolutely needs a federal act to protect
animals from cruelty. But even more than that we need our officials
to abide by the laws that already exist.
The moral health and maturity of a society is judged by how it
treats its underprivileged and weak: old people, children, disabled
and animals. Judging by how Russia treats its most disadvantaged
beings – stray animals – it has always been, and still
is the “Evil Empire.”
We are appealing to you because we have exhausted all legitimate
domestic tools to change this state of affairs. We are not on
the same level: some of us rule world powers and make decisions
that change the course of history; others simply try to get by
day by day. But one thing we have in common: we are all human
beings.
We trust that your thoughts as heads of states are lofty and humane,
but, like Dostoevsky said, no harmony is possible if there is
the tear of at least one innocent child on its foundation. As
St. Petersburg gets ready to host the leaders of the world’s
most powerful nations, it paves the way for the Summit with dead
animals. In this city, animals die in pain every day, and people
who loved them grieve. This gratuitous carnage is a crime against
both God’s and human law. Please use your influence and
make our President stop this genocide. You are our only hope.
the 2nd of June
Elena Bobrova
Marina Ermakova
Svetlana Los’
Tatiana Goritcheva
Санкт-Петербург,
п.Тярлево, ул.
Спортивная,
д.2, Тел./факс:466-78-34, ИНН 7801116120
р/с 40703810640105000011 в ОАО
«Инкасбанк»,
БИК 044030829, к/с 30101810800000000829,
196625, Russia, St.Petersburg,
pos.Tyarlevo, ul. Sportivnaya 2, phone/fax: 7-812-466-78-34, 7-812-532-45-74
e-mail:
baltanimal@yandex.ru dezy88@mail.ru
196625, Russia, St.Petersburg, pos.Tyarlevo, ul. Sportivnaya 2,
phone/fax: 7-812-466-78-34, 7-812-532-45-74
e-mail: baltanimal@yandex.ru dezy88@mail.ru
1. Chemical names should be lower case.
2. Petergofskoye Shosse
3. Newspaper reference sites:
http://www.refdesk.com/paper.html
http://www.world-newspapers.com/
http://www.newspapers.com/
4. Sen. John McCain (Republican from Arizona) called
for a US boycott of the G-8 summit.
His contact information:
Washington DC Web Address:
http://mccain.senate.gov/
Washington DC Web Mail Address:
http://mccain.senate.gov/index.cfm?fuseaction=Contact.Home
Washington DC Address
241 Russell Senate Office Building
Washington, DC 20510
Phone: 202-224-2235
Fax: 202-228-2862
District Address - Phoenix
5353 North 16th Street
Suite 105
Phoenix, AZ 85016
Phone: 602-952-2410
Fax: 602-952-8702
Good luck,
Chris
