https://bellona.org/news/nuclear-issues/2018-05-chernobyls-stray-dogs-are-bound-for-new-homes-in-the-us
The legacy of the Chernobyl dogs is heartbreaking. When some 120,000 people were evacuated in the wake of the nuclear disaster, they were forced to leave their pets behind. Chernobyl Prayer, a wrenching oral history of the time, tells of “dogs howling, trying to get on the buses. Mongrels, alsatians. The soldiers were pushing them out again, kicking them. They ran after the buses for ages.”
Heartbroken families pinned notes to their doors: “Don’t kill our Zhulka. She’s a good dog.” There was no mercy. The army sent in extermination squads to shoot the animals. But those who survived the soldiers and the radiation rebuilt their communities as packs and now their ancestors populate the zone.
The Clean Futures fund says that the some 250 dogs living around the destroyed nuclear power plant were likely driven out of the surrounding forests by the burgeoning population of wolves, as well as by lack of food.
Another 225 does roam Chernobyl City itself, and yet others live and scrounge at security checkpoints and throughout the abandoned communities of the Exclusions Zone. Most of the dogs, says the fund, are under the age of 4 or 5, and cleanup workers often look after them, feeding the and tending to them when they are ill.
At the beginning of June, the Clean Future Fund, with partners veterinarians from the University of South Carolina will look the dogs over for signed of radiation poisoning and genetic damage before they depart for greener shores. The team will also issue vaccinations against rabies, parvovirus, distemper and hepatitis. They are also neutering the dogs.
There’s no word yet on exactly where the dogs will be settled when they arrive in the United States, or whether potential owners will be told that their new pets immigrated from the world’s most notorious disaster site. But the adoption program, from the canine point of view, is sure to receive glowing reviews.
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