Summary:
The current event, Racing to save the stray dogs of Sochi, takes place in Sochi, Russia. This event is about Sochi having a huge abundant of stray dogs, roaming the streets where the Winter Olympics took place. Sochi’s government decided to pay a pest removal company to come out and take care of the problem. What the company did was throw raw poisoned meat out for them to eat or they had shot them with a poison that suffocated them. This effort to remove the dogs began in October, and about 300 dogs a month were killed. Animal rights workers and a kind Russian billionaire have opened a shelter for these strays. The city had told them they had 4 days to collect the animals or they would be shot. So animal right workers had gotten a golf cart, called the “dog rescue”, and scoured the Olympic campus, picking up the animals and delivering them to the shelter. The shelter is an outdoor shantytown of doghouses on a hill, outside the city. They are calling the shelter PovoDog, in Russian means leash. This makeshift shelter has already saved up to 80 animals, including a dozen puppies. Animal right workers say that most of strays were pets, or offspring’s of pets, abandoned by families whose homes were demolished over the past few years to make way for the Olympic venues. Russia has never made a priority of pushing responsible animal control policies, including spaying or neutering. If they did this would have helped avoid the current problems. With all this going on, Humane Society International wrote to Russia’s President Putin and urged him to prevent the killings of dogs, knowing that President Putin is also a dog lover. All he could say was that Sochi has more stray dogs than their other cities, and that only the unhealthy dogs were being killed. Which was true, the strays were found inside sports venues and have even wandered into the residence where our Olympic athletes were staying. So a man who had made his