Extermination d'animaux dans les rues de St Petersburg Agir!

Je transmet ce message original

Extermination d'animaux da ns les rues de St Petersburg pour prépare r l'arrivée du G8 en juillet

Merci d'envoyer et de faire circuler massivement.

Des centaines d'animaux sont exterminés pour préparer l'arrivée du G8 à
St Petersburg et ainsi "nettoyer les rues".

*Adresses :

news.desk@express.co.uk

news@dailystar.co.uk

newseditor@independent.co.uk

news.editor@courier.co.uk
editor.kentonline@thekmgroup.co.uk

news@standard.co.uk

newsroom@london.newsquest.co.uk

peoplenews@mgn.co.uk

steve.Purcell@mirror.co.uk

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.

Nom + pays