Moscow Spending $64M To Spay Stray Dogs
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
MOSCOW — Moscow is spending $64 million to castrate as many as 50,000 stray dogs because of a rising number of attacks on people, including one fatality this month. A Soviet-era policy of shooting homeless animals was abandoned in 2002. Mayor Yuri Luzhkov, under pressure from animal-rights groups to uphold the ban, has now decided on a two-year program to stop the dogs from breeding, the city’s top animal official, Natalia Sokolova, said. Moscow’s 10.5 million residents are more likely to be attacked by a dog than by a mugger, according to the mayor’s office. More than 22,000 Muscovites were bitten last year, a rate of 60 a day. One-third of those were hospitalized with severe injuries.
