The Cabinet of Ministers saw yesterday a picket of animal protectors who demanded that public utility services immediately stop the physical destruction of animals – a practice they think is common all over Ukraine. The protestors said they did not represent any organization and had come to know about this event from Facebook and Ukrainska Pravda, where animal rights champion Natalia Vyshnevska called upon all those concerned to attend the action “Stop it.”
The protestors called for changing the approach to the problem of homeless animals, using the European experience. This means that this function should be withdrawn form public utility facilities, which are not interested in reducing the number of stray dogs and cats in a humane way, and transferred to animal protection civic organizations. The protesters also noted that killings of homeless animals had assumed a mass scale lately due to attempts of the local authorities to “clean up” the areas they are responsible for on the eve of Euro-2012. They emphasized, incidentally, that the poison that public utility servicemen scatter on the streets also often causes the death of home-kept animals. Den/The Day has repeatedly highlighted the protests aimed at solving the problem of stray animals, but, unfortunately, instead of being solved, this problem is becoming more and more acute as time goes by.
COMMENTARY
Dina HURA, animal rights advocate, Kyiv:
“My colleagues and I are also demanding at this picket the closure of the website of dog hunters, the people who kill homeless animals and spread information on this. I don’t understand why our police and prosecutors do not react to this, for it’s propaganda of sadism. We and our foreign counterparts are outraged with this site. Ukraine is now a place of a mass-scale extermination of animals. We seem to be cooperating well with the Kyiv authorities – Mr. Mazurchak and Mr. Holubchenko before him. We meet and make some constructive deals… But, at the same time, animals are being poisoned and shot down on a mass scale. I think if the authorities really wanted to find the culprits, they would manage to do so. Even one court case would be enough to deter the others because there is a law that prohibits cruelty to animals. But there have been no precedents of this kind. For example, last spring some dogs were poisoned near the National Defense Academy. We brought around two of them. We did everything the way we should: we called the police and people from the animal identification center, and carried the corpse to a laboratory. But it turned out that the lab had no markers to identify the poison. As usual, there was nobody to blame. As for the demands to disband the utility companies that are supposed to deal with stray dogs, we, for example, are cooperating very well with the Kyiv-based company Animals’ Refuge. We maintain a good relationship with this organization. In general, there should be refuges in every city, but not for one and a half or two thousand animals, for in this case it is impossible to care about each dog. These are sort of animal prisons. Refuges should be small. There are enough people in the provinces, who know how to do this function. By all accounts, there should be a mass-scale sterilization campaign that would involve a large number of animals and more than one clinic. In my view, people should also be educated to display a humane attitude to every living creature around us. I am afraid inhumane attitude to animals may well tarnish the image of Ukraine on the eve of Euro-2012. My impression is that some political forces are trying to discredit this country. But why should innocent animals suffer?”
