Hordes of dogs in our yards are the problem of citizens’ security, in the first place. That permanent presence of unattended dogs in the streets does not add to such security is so obvious, need not be proved. Conversely, this means that habitation of such dogs cannot be regarded as an object of animal protection. Nobody can protect what infringes on the rights of others. Not only humans. The city’s wildlife is beyond the verge of survival through the fault of stray dogs. The question is point-blank: either dogs, or other animals.
    Free habitation of dogs in Moscow was legitimized in 2001 within the framework of the dog neutering program. The main ideologists of the program insist that “stray dogs are waste utilizers and pose as food competitors to the rat, homeless cat and crow" and that a "strategy of complete annihilation of stray dogs” results in “unpredictable outbreaks of proliferation of all kinds of rodents, cats and crows". One can deduce from this that the program was designed exclusively as humane towards stray dogs, and was unfriendly towards homeless cats, which are equated by program authors with rats and crows. Mass extermination of homeless cats by stray dogs that we witness today may be said to have been programmed. Therefore, we may contend “the initial design documentation” of the program in question (if it existed at all?!) contradicts the proclaimed aims of its application, i.e. “reduce in a humane manner the population of homeless dogs and CATS ".
    We tried hard to search for the reasons underlying the idea of neutering stray dogs and returning them back in the streets that emerged in Moscow, but were unable to find any convincing arguments in favor of this conception: serious scientific research, financial-and-economic and legal validations, and results of the state ecological expertise. We have studied earnestly the experience of industrialized countries in solving this problem, but were unable to find any country, where the problem of homeless animals was settled successfully specifically through dog neutering and return of the dogs back in the street.
    Last July, Moscow officials canceled mandatory trapping of even aggressive stray dogs by specialized city services, irrespective of the number of bites inflicted by such dogs, provided the bites were inflicted “in a locality regarded safe from the standpoint of the rabies disease incidence”.
    The document of the City Service for Wild Animals Trapping addressed to local DEZes, says that “if the application emphasizes aggressive behavior of animals and contains a request not to return the animals to their former habitats, there must be an indication of the name and address of the animal shelter set up by the Prefecture on the territory of the district". This may be construed as follows: if there is no animal shelter, no stray dogs will be trapped. As we know, there are few districts with animal shelters. But even if there is one, nobody can guarantee vacancies there. At the same time, the manager of a DEZ writes in his desperate letter to the district council: “Attention should be drawn to the fact that following neutering, the dogs are returned to their former habitat, which is inadmissible and does not solve the problem. The dogs are aggressive, feral, bunched up in hordes; they look like wild beasts, charge humans. People are afraid of leaving their homes, they have to obtain permissions to be absent from their jobs in order to take children to school. There are cases of children being attacked by stray dogs. There are also numerous cases of humans being bitten and their clothes torn”. Can it possibly be reconciled with Art. 19, Part 2 of the RF Constitution and with Article 17 of the RF Law “Fundamentals of the RF Legislation on Health Protection of Citizens”, whereby the right to citizens’ health protection shall not depend on their place of residence? Besides, there exists the principle of priority of preventive measures in the field of citizens’ health protection, provided for by Article 2 of the above Law. It is obvious that as far as bites by stray dogs are concerned, the preventive measure may certainly be dog trapping before, not after the bites are inflicted.
    The neutering program per se is in conflict with the universally recognized standards of handling the animals and with the world doctrine of humaneness towards animals. The most authoritative animal welfare organizations – leaders of the world animal protection movement – maintain that it is impossible to leave stray dogs in the street. It is mandatory practice in industrialized countries to trap stray dogs and place them in state-run animal shelters that shall admit dogs without any limitations. If the new owner for animals staying at a shelter cannot be found, such animals are drugged to sleep without pain. Animal protection organizations see to it that the procedure is conducted in a humane manner and by all means support this forced measure. After all, the main thing to them is to make sure that the shelters are not congested, otherwise admission of animals to the shelters will be paralyzed, which means that the animals will again be thrown out onto the street. This is the way the cat and dog population is controlled in countries, where animal-protection legislation may be regarded as a model of humaneness.
    The European Convention for the Protection of Pet Animals treats humaneness as the absence of pain, fear and suffering in animals. According to this doctrine, painless drugging to sleep is the best alternative to suffering, followed by vicious death of the animal in the street. Russia signed the Agreement on Partnership and Cooperation with EU in 1997, and therefore it must do anything to bring its laws in conformity with the EU legislation, which means that Russia must act in the spirit of the aforesaid European Convention. If this is the case, the legitimation of free habitation of stray dogs will soon have to be done away with, even if someone is against this.
    However, regulation of the cat and dog population in the western countries is based on legislative and economic mechanisms that do not allow the pet owners having unwanted posterity of their pet cats and dogs, i.e. proliferate the population of potential shelter dwellers. Unless such mechanisms are adopted, there may be no solution of the homeless animals problem in any country. Unfortunately, as far as Moscow is concerned, these postulates are ignored.
    Officials in charge of the neutering program are not in a hurry to inform the general public of the numerous sad attributes of this program. Meanwhile, there are documents confirming these: steady growth of the number of dog bites, fatal cases resulting from stray dog attacks on humans, the growing hazard of the rabies disease, extermination by dogs of the fauna entered in the Red Data Books, apartments of Muscovites crammed with saved animals. On the basis of the results of a recent survey of homeless cats in Moscow conducted by VTSIOM, our experts estimate that every day stray dogs kill over 100 homeless cats in Moscow. Is this called “humane regulation” of the cat population?! Nevertheless, efforts to hide these shortcomings, to put it mildly, yield the result: in the Moscow 2006 budget Rbls. 76 million is already allocated to finance the ill-fated program (twice as much as in 2005!).
    Moscow proponents of free habitation of dogs, while playing the oracle on humaneness of the neutering program and on how safe stray dogs are, try to muddle the problem. They only succeeded in one thing: in Moscow, hordes of stray dogs are annihilated secretly and brutally. In this connection, we wish to remind the old wise saying: using lies, one can hold out for a while, but never will one achieve a positive result.

    Svetlana ILYINSKAYA, Yevgeny ILYINSKY
    Autonomous non-profit organization “Center for Animal Welfare Legal
    Protection”