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Sara Petrosyan

Establishing Dog Shelters in Yerevan: Strays to Have a Choice of Residence

4,000 dogs were shot on the streets of in Yerevan in 2001. In 2004, this number had more than doubled-8,100 dogs were killed, costing the Mayor's Office an average of 3,695 drams per dog, or 28 million drams in total. This year, the city plans to adopt a new approach in the fight against stray animals in the capital, and has announced a tender for the construction of a dog shelter to be held on July 1st.

Three companies are to compete, two of which have already put together projects. The organizations are doing all they can to be as competitive as possible, and claim that they have sponsors willing to finance their programs. But two of the rival organizations - SOS and Eurasia - name the same person as their sponsor. According to Eurasia, this is because a SOS manager stole their project from the Mayor's Office where he works, and is now attempting to lure their sponsor away.

It turns out, however, that a non-governmental organization, Dunay, began construction of a dog shelter in 2004. "We wanted to save the animals as soon as possible," said Tamara Sarsgyan, a member of that organization.

Dunay's president, Armen Ghazaryan, claims that the prime minister of the Republic of Armenia approved of their plan to set up a dog shelter and advised the city to give them permission in a civilized manner in July 2004. "The Mayor's Office stated that they too preferred that approach, and they advised us to be prepared for the tender that was supposed to be launched on July 30th of last year," he said.

"We had only ten days to construct twenty compartments and take care of as many dogs, as well as to set up an operating room to sterilize them, just so they would allow us to participate in the tender," Sargsyan explained. We found suitable land in the Erebuni municipality, and a few of us put together the necessary money and planned to establish the shelter with the slogan, 'Let's Keep the Dogs from Being Shot." We finished the necessary preparation on the agreed date, but our claim to the tender was not registered and we were not allowed to participate."

The construction of the shelter is still underway in Erebuni's Arin-Berd, but without Dunay. "A lot of people smelled money, so they were all pushed aside," Sarsgyan said. She explained that following the favorable response from the prime minister, Nuné Mehrabyan, a pianist by profession, and Khajak Karayan, president of a company called the Center for Yerevan Governing Technologies, CSJC, joined them in March 2004 to found an organization called SOS. Today, Nune Mehrabyan is the president of SOS, and SOS is running the shelter.

"We started this work ten months ago," Mehrabyan said. "We have more than fifty dogs here now - we usually round them up when we get a warning that they're coming to shoot them. We have three employees - a cleaner, a veterinarian, and a guard. We feed them twice a day and conduct physical examinations - sick dogs are isolated and treated."

The animal shelter has two floors with nearly 100 compartments. There is a separate building where sick street dogs are quarantined. Twenty to twenty-five animals are sterilized each day, and once they recover, they are vaccinated against rabies and other diseases. Finally, some of the dogs are released back into the area where they were picked up, wearing special collars, to continue their work as "sanitation agents"-killing the city's rodents. Dogs with incurable illnesses are destroyed.

Financial problems have made construction difficult, Mehrabyan says, but they are doing everything that can to put in a competitive bid on July 1 st . She claims that many foreigners have offered financial support when they've seen the work being done. "When the announcements were made, an Armenian in New York, Karo Alexanyan, wrote us a letter. He has aided in the construction of dog shelters in different countries and promised to help us as well," Mehrabyan said. "He has an agreement with the mayor - he will do all this on the condition that the shooting stops, and the mayor has agreed." She says Alexanyan has agreed to provide the equipment necessary for sterilization, but since it is not clear when it will get here they decided not to wait, and have started operating using equipment obtained from hospitals.

Nver Torosyan is the president of Eurasia, another organization that plans to compete in the tender. "This was the program that we presented in 2004 to the Mayor's Office, in order to receive permission to build a dog shelter," he said. "After that, articles started appearing in the media from time to time unedited, written in our words." Torosyan says his organization feared their project might be stolen, and affirmed their right to it in time. "The Mayor's Office probably hadn't thought that we would have gone that far," he added. Mayor Yervand Zakaryan had approved their program to build a shelter for Yerevan's homeless animals in 2004, writing, "The Office of the Mayor declares its responsibility in providing multilateral support for the implementation of this program and is prepared to offer the necessary three hectares of land for the construction of a shelter for the homeless, stray animals of Yerevan. The Mayor's Office is also prepared to offer financial support for the continuing operation of the shelter in the future."

But the land allocation kept getting postponed. "We visited the proposed areas with experts and chose the one in the Ajapniak municipality. We sent the expert assessment to the Mayor's Office. Everything was fine at first - we made payments for the measurements and the preliminary blueprints, which were done by the Yerevan Project Institute. Months later, they refused to give us that land, saying that it was located too close to Ajapniak's water tank" Torosyan said. He explained that during their prolonged negotiations with the Mayor's Office, other organizations came on the scene and contacted their sponsors, even before the organizations had registered for the tender, in the hopes of taking the aid money themselves. "Our foreign partners found out that the dog killing was still going on, and they accused us of conspiring with the Mayor's Office. When we were firm with the Mayor's Office, they offered us new land, which was not as good an offer, but we had to make do." The Mayor's Office announced its decision to allocate three hectares of land to Eurasia for the construction of an animal shelter in 2005. By this time, Karo Alexanyan, who had offered to sponsor Eurasia, had pulled out.

We asked why there was such a sudden surge of interest in building animal shelters, when for example, there are so many homeless humans, and no one seems to be in a rush to do anything for them. Torosyan explained, "I don't know what objective the interested organizations are pursuing, but in any case, this is about solving the problem of stray animals; this is just business. The Mayor's Office has money to spend." The Mayor's Office pays out 20 million drams to have dogs shot every year. That amount is now up for grabs, and everyone wants a piece of it, even Damiark, an organization that carries out dog shootings.

Karen Gevorgyan heads the Trade Department at the Office of the Mayor of Yerevan; his jurisdiction includes the problem of stray animals. He says the Mayor's Office has no such budget allocation for animal control, but that they receive money from the central government under the heading "miscellaneous expenses".

Nver Torosyan of Eurasia doesn't believe that there is any organization in Armenia today that can adequately address the problem; they lack both the specialists and equipment needed to catch the animals.

He explains that his organization has an agreement with the World Health Organization, which is willing to provide them with volunteers and medication, and to organize training. Furthermore, Eurasia has made arrangements to breed purebred dogs for military units and border patrol, and to train dogs for the Tax Department and Ministry of Internal Affairs in Moscow. They expect to complete building the shelter, planned for 500 stray animals, within a year.

The method is the same as for SOS - stray dogs will be brought in, sterilized, kept for seven days, trained, vaccinated, and set free. Not all of them will be released; those that cannot be treated will be destroyed. Animals must be caught every six months and vaccinated. None of the organizations can currently provide us with information as to how many dogs there are in the Republic, but Eurasia assures us that if, within three years, 70% of the stray dog population passes through their shelter, the number will go down by 50-60%.

Currently, the focus is on one aspect of the matter-to stop the cruel killing of stray dogs. But experts are pointing to other sides of the problem, which they say cannot be addressed by merely putting an end to the shooting. One veterinarian, Professor H. Naghashyan, was quoted in the press recently as saying, "The 'humanistic' idea that stray dogs should not be killed, and should only be sterilized, does not provide any solutions for preventing the spread of echinococcosis or toxoplasmosis. On the contrary, cases of echinocossis have risen by 15-20% in domestic animals in recent years. Man gets infected by these diseases only from dogs. Sterilization has no effect whatsoever on the life cycles of the causative agents of these diseases."

Yerevan's Chief Veterinarian, Viktor Abrahamyan, is categorically opposed to the idea of using dogs as sanitation agents for the city, although this approach is a cornerstone in the strategy of both SOS and Eurasia. "If a dog eats a rat, then it is already a potential carrier of tularemia. Dogs aren't trash collectors - let the people who are meant to do that job deal with it. There are also specific people dealing with rodent extermination - the sanitary-epidemic service is doing a conscientious job on that front." He says that these animal shelters will not solve the problem. "It is difficult to catch dogs, and they have to vaccinate them. They have to catch each dog every 45 days and deworm it - is that possible?"

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