Subway Dogs

[Aemilius Paulus]

Frags is partially right, though. The metro dogs are 50/50 legend/truth - most of the stuff about them is greatly exaggerated, but they do exist. Mainlythe strays, though. Yes, stray dogs are comparatively *very* common in Moscow (for some reason Russians do not practise animal sterelisation that much), but the metro dogs are rather rare, and stories of their intelligence are a common fodder for sensationalist gossip; also, for instance, the story of Yulia Romanova is a well-known hoax.

It all began on the site pravda.ru, and once it hit teh Internets, the naive, trusting, and the PETA-junkies spread it through the blogs, due to the shock value as well as the well-spun tale of the 'evolved' Russian stray dogs. The result was that it even managed to get to the comparatively Respected FT - a shame for that newspaper, IMHO, although the story FT ran did not revolve solely about that specific event, so I have to give them a bit of credit for that.

Look, Pravda, the tangible newspaper, is (or rather, was) the most respected name in Russian news industry (founded in the first decade of the 1900s)- along with Komsomolskaya Pravda which took its place today. Yes. That much is true. But if you were a Russian, or an expert on the country, you would know that pravda.ru is utter filth, even by Russian online news (which tend to drift in the direction of yellow journalism slightly more so than in other Western nations). Pravda.ru is unaffiliated with the paper PRavda, and pravda.ru's main focus is sensationalist, right-wing stories with the most minimal credibility. The old Pravda has their own site, gazeta-pravda.ru. Two different etities. Especially since the old Pravda is left.

And common sense by itself reveals the lack of veracity in the story. 'Top-model' carrying a kintchen knife in her purse, and viciously attacking a dog with a presumably unweildy, short kitchen knife (I doubt she had a dagger). Really? Would the dog not attack her back? Bite her? All she has is a short knife. ANd the motivces? WTH would a woman, a model of all (stereotypically such demgraphic would be rather sqeumish) be so aggressive to an animal who was simply barking at her? Really?

So yes, there is much myth in the article, Fragony, but Lemur has his points as well. Like I said, Moscow has an unusually large amount of stray dogs, and yes, they do make their way into the metro. But no, the dogs are not very special, and no, they do not ride the subway all the time. PErhaps isolated occurences, but not as common as any articles would suggest.

I personally lived much of my European life in Nizhniy Novgorod, Moscow, and Kiev (Ukraine) up until 2005 - when that incident supposedly happened. I have not seen any dogs in the actual metro carriages. Neither have I seen them in Kiev, where the number of stray dogs, incidentally, is also very high. That fact by itself is highly suspicions, as one would expect similar parallel development, given nearly identical conditions. I have used the Kiev metro later in my life, so I remember it better. I can assure you, there are no dogs there. There are checkpoints barring unrestricted entry into the metro and subway lines themselves are only accessible through (usually) an escalator system - which is very much long, as the subway is very deep. Former Soviet subways are build as secondary bomb shelters, with the vehicles travelling deep down, while an upper underground level exists for all sorts of sores, shops, boutiques, restaurants (rather rare compared to the quantity of various shops) and other commercial venues. I cannot account for all stations, but that were my overall impressions. Not much potential for a sizeable dog infiltration.

Whatever it may be, the dogs are probably not that numerous (or simply have increased in the past years), since I fail to recollect any from my personal life there. But yes, the strays are appallingly common, no denying of that.