Animals
There is an interesting place in Rome’s historic center. It is an ordinary city square, but a considerable part of it is a gaping hole. It is actually an archaeological site. Passersby can marvel at what is left of columns, foundations, and pedestals of statues. All this dates back 2,000 years, to the period of the Third Roman Republic. The most amazing thing about this site is not the ancient stones but the cats. They are everywhere: near the columns, on the ground, and among the remnants of arches. They are silent, dignified, with an invincible sense of self-respect. They sit or lie in regal postures. The feeling is they have always been here, from the times of the Third Republic, maybe even earlier. This is their city. These great Roman cats allow us to be here, not the other way around.
The mystery is solved when you climb down inside the ruins and discover a kennel that has been set up in several underground rooms. There are hundreds of cats here and a few enthusiastic women, who take care of them. The cats are in good shape: they are all sterilized, fed, and clean.
Rome is an eternal city because it respects itself and all its residents.
There is an unforgettable scene in Asthenic Syndrome, one of Kira Muratova’s most painful films. It is shot in an ordinary state-run kennel, not in Italy — here. It is not an animal shelter, just a place where homeless animals are brought to be put down. The camera zooms in on a cage filled with dogs. Not a sound is heard. The dogs stare at the viewer. There are many of them. “Many” is the wrong word: a giant mass of flesh in a slow agony. It is hard to make out paws and tails. All you remember is the eyes, bright and unmoving. Seeing this is like having a needle driven under your fingernail.
Not so long ago, in Raduzhny, a housing development in Kyiv, not far from an elementary school, an overinquisitive boy tried to make friends with a bitch that had just given birth. Of course she bit him, not hard, just enough to make him keep his distance. The alarmed parents called a “state service” that “deals with” animals; in other words, dogcatchers. They killed the dog right in front of the boy and grabbed the puppies with iron hooks. This is the way they “took measures.”
One Sunday morning I went under the Arch of Friendship and saw several dogs and cats, and a few women, who were almost as enthusiastic as the ones in Rome, although there was much less joy in their voices. They were from an animal shelter in Hostomil, engaged in the project “Find a Friend.” They were giving away animals for free to anyone who wanted them, because their shelter is overcrowded. Even so, it is a real shelter, because the animals there:
are not starved to death; do not have to kill each other to eat; are not slaughtered for lard, which is then sold to prisons; are not turned into chicken feed.
All this is done in a different place, by different people: by a municipal “care” service, in other words, dogcatchers, who work at an “animal shelter” in the town of Borodianka. It was opened with taxpayers’ money right after an international scandal, when a similar concentration camp for animals near Kyiv had to be closed down. Millions of hryvnias are being spent on the “humane treatment” of animals, which go right into the dogcatchers’ pockets.
They say that the doggies in Borodianka are supplied with black caviar.
When the women from Hostomil picket city hall, they are scolded not by bureaucrats but passersby, who say it’s stupid to make a fuss about such things, what with so many children living in the street. However, according to the realities of Aesthenic Syndrome, people also suffer because their cages — their invisible, inner ones — are as suffocating as those that are packed with dogs.
Our attitude to homeless children is directly related to the extent of our indifference to other beings that had the misfortune of being born with four legs and a tail. I don’t know how else to explain this.
Well, maybe like this:
Sixty years ago big vans rumbled down our streets, in which innocent people were being killed by poison.
These trucks are still passing beneath our windows.
