The dogs that catch the trains

BY NICK BARNETT

If you ride Moscow's Metro trains, you're liable to meet some unusual fellow passengers. A few of the city's 35,000 stray dogs, carving out a living in the city they share with 10 million people, have learnt to use the trains.

They board at the stop closest to where they sleep, take a seat or curl up on the carriage floor, and head towards central city stations rich with passengers who might be persuaded to share food with them.

Later, the dogs board the train again and head away, apparently fully aware of how the train system works (apart from the fare structure, presumably).

They're said to rarely relieve themselves in the carriages.

(Here's a Russian-language website where people share their photographs of train-riding dogs.)

Muscovites - some of them, anyway - have taken fondly to the dogs in a city where stray packs have been a feature of life for 150 years, especially so in the 20 years since the end of the Soviet era.

Those who love, or at least tolerate, the strays let the dogs travel in peace, feed them, build shelters for them, stand up for their humane treatment by authorities, and even honour the familiar ones.

When a passenger stabbed one of the strays to death at Mendeleyevskaya station several years ago, residents rallied to build a statue in honour of the dog, known as Malchick.

And the dogs are the subject of studies, which have made some arresting findings. The strays have shifted their social structures to fit the city environment, rewarding the smartest dog, not the toughest, with alpha male status. Intelligence and psychological astuteness has grown among the dogs, which find a way to survive as scavengers, beggars, or companions to security workers.

Besides the ones that have figured out the train system, the dogs are said to cross roads on the "walk" signal, and some have worked out how to approach some pedestrians from behind and startle them with a bark, causing them to drop food which they can then run off with.

The strays are usually not aggressive, according to what I've read. But there has been violence. A man died in a pack attack last year, and a woman miscarried after she, too, was savaged.

Inevitably, there's pressure on city authorities to move against the dogs. The council abandoned the shooting of stray dogs in favour of sterilising them, and pledged to build shelters, but animal-rights critics say the shelters are too few, and dogs that are picked up and taken to a shelter, ostensibly for neutering, will certainly die there.

The strays are, or are descended from, dogs abandoned by owners or breeders.

Reading about the Moscow strays reminded me of other domesticated animals that have "gone independent": the cats of Ueno park in Tokyo, the parrots of San Francisco, even our own Kaimanawa horses. You can probably think of others.

I'd hate to see gangs of stray dogs in New Zealand. I'd see it as evidence of decline and failure. Strays are bad news, for so many reasons.

So I know that some people will have no sympathy for strays and be eager to see them all dead. But I've got a lot of admiration for the likes of Moscow's dogs, for several reasons.

First, these dogs are a species that was created by humans, still often wolf-like but also highly people-oriented. I've said before in blogs about how I feel this history obliges humans to pay special attention to companion species and not betray the trust we have bred into them.

Second, those Moscow dogs, or their ancestors, were abandoned to a fate that was a likely death - yet they've survived, carved out a niche in a huge city and earned the respect of many people around them. They've shown amazing adaptability and are a reminder of what an extraordinary creature the dog is.

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Lower pictures: Reuters