If it barks, kill it: Kiddie-biting stray dogs in Sochi set for cull before Winter Olympics

Stray dogs roam outside the venue for the snowboarding and freestyle venue in Sochi

‘Children-biting’ stray dogs are in the sights of crack team of exterminators who have vowed to clean-up Sochi before the start of the Winter Olympics later this week.


Thousands of dogs are reported to be roaming the streets of the Black Sea coastal city and worried municipal officials have acted by handing a local pest control firm the job of culling the dangerous allegedly hounds before the Games begin.

Mutt-killer-in-chief Alexei Sorokin, boss of Basya Services, says his company has been exterminating stray dogs in Sochi for years but now has a licence to kill the rest in order to prevent an embarrassing canine assault on an unsuspecting athlete or IOC official. Some of them are ‘biting children’, he claimed.

These hounds better watch out as a dog cull is in operation in sochi

Sorokin said he attended a rehearsal of the Olympic opening ceremony last week and even saw one cheeky mongrel walking in on the performers.
‘A dog ran into the Fisht Stadium, we took it away,’ Sorokin said.
 ‘God forbid something like this happens at the actual opening ceremony. This will be a disgrace for the whole country.’
Sorokin refused to say whether they shoot or poison the unfortunate dogs, or where they take the carcasses. He also refused to say how many lucklesspooches they kill a year, calling it ‘a commercial secret.’

This stray pooch found its way into the Olympic Park in Sochi

District lawman Sergei Krivonosov, from the Krasnodar region in which Sochi lies, said the dogs’ elimination is the quickest way to solve the problem and it was Russia’s ‘responsibility to the international community’.

He conceded, however, this is ‘not the most humane way’ of dealing with the problem and said authorities should encourage dog shelters, as requested by local animal rights activists.