(Beth Clifton collage)
Almost every major animal charity in Europe is involved in Ukraine somehow
KIEV, Ukraine––Underway six times as long, with almost certainly six-plus times the human and animal body count, though both sides remain reticent about losses, the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022 often seems to be a forgotten war in U.S. public concern and news coverage––except on February 24, 2024, when animal charities around the world inundated social media with claims of having had boots on the muddy, frozen ground rescuing pets and other animals all along.
Those based in Europe or with a significant European presence often have been.
(Beth Clifton collage)
Far from U.S., but close to all of Europe
Far from the U.S., with a fraction of the cultural ties to the U.S. of either Israel or Gaza, Ukraine is nonetheless much closer to all of western Europe than U.S. dog rescues routinely haul pit bulls to try to find them “forever” homes.
Of course the Humane Society of the U.S. subsidiary Humane Society International, the German affiliate of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, the World Wildlife Fund, the International Fund for Animals, Four Paws, animal charities from most neighboring nations, Belarus excepted, and many others are involved in Ukraine, because what goes on there is as much of immediate concern as a tank invasion of Texas would be to people in New York City, Seattle, or Los Angeles.
(Beth Clifton collage)
48 metric tons of cat litter
Even Good Housekeeping on February 23, 2024 joined the sudden saturation attention to animals in Ukraine, profiling the work of Luhansk-area rescuer Irina Bas and her daughter Alina. have been rescuing animals abandoned during the conflict.
Caught in Russian-occupied Ukraine, behind the Russian lines since 2022, their home-based shelter, Bas Dogs, now houses 80 dogs and 15 cats in makeshift runs, most of them left behind by refugees from the fighting who were barely able to escape with their children.
Humane Society International, working with the Ukrainian Red Cross, on February 22, 2024 announced that it had “provided emergency relief in 14 regions across Ukraine, reaching over 19,000 pet guardians and 40,000 pets and delivering over 205 metric tons of pet food,” along with “48 metric tons of cat litter, 3,530 litter boxes, 2,500 pet carriers, and 9,000 packages of flea and tick prevention.”
(Beth Clifton collage)
“Safe spaces for housing animals in need”
PETA-Germany spokesperson Stephanie Goettge said a day later, on February 23, 2024, that PETA personnel had “created 1,300 safe spaces for housing animals in need, including dogs, cats, horses, sheep, goats, chickens, pigeons, geese, ducks, swans, and fish.
“Every month,” Goettge continued, “team members perform spay/neuter surgeries for around 150 animals to prevent thousands from being born on the streets.
How urgent is that concern? Reported Radio Free Europe, “In 2021, there were 267 homeless dogs in Druzhkivka, a town that had a pre-war human population of 54,000. Since the invasion, volunteers are now feeding more than 900 dogs and almost 1,400 cats that roam the pockmarked streets.”
(Beth Clifton collage)
PETA-Germany
“Animals in Ukraine have received [via PETA-Germany],” PETA-Germany spokesperson Goettge said, “more than 1,650 metric tons of food and other provisions, despite conditions that often make deliveries difficult.
“All the animals in the project receive regular veterinary care. Those who will be transported to Europe for adoption are quarantined and prepared for the journey in accordance with European Union regulations,” a 16-week-per-animal procedure, Goettge described.
“Around 60% of the animals are reunited with their guardians who have fled,” Goettge estimated, “while the remaining 40% are transported to our partner shelters in Europe.
“Every day,” Goettge summarized, “85 PETA-supported employees work on site to care for the animals there and rescue others.
(Beth Clifton collage)
Animal Rescue Kharkiv
Elaborated PETA public relations coordinator Sara Groves, “More than 15,000 impacted by the war have been saved by PETA Germany,” partnering with “PETA-supported Animal Rescue Kharkiv (ARK), and other rescue organizations.”
For example, Groves offered, “Rescuers worked urgently—under the threat of heavy shelling—to successfully get 40 terrified dogs and cats out of the embattled Kherson region, which faced 25 direct aerial bombs in the village of Vesele in one day.
“With animals’ food supply in Ukraine running perilously low, a team that produces and transports food for starving animals managed to skirt a trucker blockade at the Polish border with Ukraine to successfully deliver the vital rations, at great risk to their own safety,” Groves emailed.
(Beth Clifton collage)
Wildlife
Ukrainer on January 29, 2024 profiled “a day in the life of an animal rescue volunteer mission in the city of Huliaipole, located just over a hundred kilometers from Zaporizhzhia and only seven kilometers from the front line.”
But the greater part of Ukrainer attention to animals, approaching the second anniversary of the Russian invasion, was a February 4, 2024 assessment of the status of wildlife in Ukraine by Ostap Reshetylo, an associate professor at Ivan Franko National University of Lviv and project manager for the World Wildlife Fund-Ukraine.
“Since the start of the full-scale war in 2022,” Reshetylo began “about 25% of Ukraine’s protected areas [for wildlife] have been occupied. This includes about 900 protected sites, 14 of them wetlands of international importance.
Ukranian white stork. (Wikipedia photo)
Storks
“Animals who are more mobile, easily startled, and have better developed self-preservation instincts — such as bears, wolves, lynx, deer, and elk — are less directly affected by the war,” Reshetylo offered. “They are rarely seen in peacetime, and even less so in regions with active warfare,” despite occasional “cases of deer and other large animals being killed by mines or tripwires in mined areas.
“It is still too early to say whether the war has changed birds’ migration routes,” Reshetylo said. “Storks, for instance, try to return to the same area or even to the same nest.
“For now, birds’ migration routes and habitats in Ukraine remain relatively stable,” Reshetylo suggested, “but the longer the war lasts, the more likely their behavior will change. This could lead to disproportionate deaths or failure to reproduce.
Ukranian steppe eagle.
(Wikipedia photo)
Steppe eagles
“Animals lower on the evolutionary tree,” Reshetylo continued, “may die more often from the effects of the war because they are less mobile and cannot escape as far as birds or larger animals.
“However, these animals are less sensitive to flashes and sounds. If their habitat does not have active hostilities, they won’t be directly affected.
“The most threatened animals,” Reshetylo warned, “are the endangered species who live in the steppe zone, where most of the war’s destruction has occurred.”
For example, Reshetylo wrote, “The steppe eagle is a bird of prey who occasionally appears in the Azov-Black Sea region during migration, listed as ‘endangered’ in the Red Book of Ukraine.”
“One of the last nesting sites of this species,” Reshetylo recounted, “was in Askania Nova, occupied by Russian troops since the beginning of the full-scale war.
Ukranian marbled polecat.
(Wikipedia photo)
Marbled polecats & steppe marmots
Listed as “vulnerable” in the Red Book of Ukraine, only about 100 marbled polecats were left in steppe areas and river valleys in Donetsk and southern Slobozhanshchyna,” Reshetylo wrote. Today, these habitats are being destroyed by hostilities.
Also at risk in the Slobozhanshchyna and Donetsk regions, Reshetylo continued, are endangered steppe marmots.
“The bison of the Zalissia and Konotop subpopulations,” Reshetylo said, “also in the Red Book of Ukraine, had their territories invaded by Russian troops in the first days of the full-scale war. Even though the Russian occupation of these territories lasted only about a month, it affected the number and general condition of the bison. The southern area of Zalissia National Park was subjected to powerful artillery and mortar shelling. Large areas of the park were mined.
American & European bison. (Beth Clifton collage)
No male bison
“The bison of Zalissia also lost the males in their population due to the war,” Reshetylo noted. “If no bulls are introduced in the near future, this subpopulation will be doomed.
“Although there were no active hostilities in the Konotop forest,” Reshetylo added, the bison there “left their usual habitats and moved deeper into the forest,” and failed to produce calves in 2023.
The European Bison Friends Society, financially supported by the World Wildlife Fund, before the war broke out, hoped to “create a new population by transporting a herd of nine bison from Poland,” Reshetylo recalled.
While that project is now suspended, Reshetylo said, “The WWF-Ukraine team believes that the bison reintroduction project can be relaunched after Ukraine wins the war,” an outcome which is by no means certain, “and the territory is completely de-mined,” a job which may take many years.
(Beth Clifton photo)
Sturgeon
“Russian troops’ destruction of the Kakhovka hydroelectric power plant [on June 6, 2023, an incident Russia blames on Ukraine] triggered an environmental and humanitarian disaster and threatened the existence of many species, including sturgeons,” Reshetylo alleged.
“Today, all species of sturgeon found in Ukrainian waters are listed as endangered or vulnerable,” Reshetylo said, but “On October 18, 2023, the WWF-Ukraine team released 2,500 young sterlet and diamond sturgeon into the Danube River.
“The Ministry of Agrarian Policy and Food of Ukraine is also working on establishing aquaculture sturgeon farms,” Reshetylo finished, “to provide fishers with an alternative source of income and to combat the poaching of sturgeon for black caviar, the main reason for their critically endangered status.”
Ukranian sandy blind mole rat.
(Beth Clifton collage)
Sandy blind mole rat
Darya Tsymbalyuk, a PhD-holding environmental humanities researcher from Ukraine now working as a BBC correspondent, on February 24, 2024 described the impact of the Kabhovka dam collapse on two endangered rodents native to the Lower Dnipro region of southern Ukraine, the sandy blind mole rat and the thick-tail jerboa.
Formerly little known even among Ukrainians, Tsymbalyuk indicated, the survival of the sandy blind mole rat and the thick-tail jerboa has now become emblematic to many of the survival of the Ukrainian nation against the Russian onslaught.
Tsymbalyuk credited local fundraising by the Ukrainian Nature Conservation Group with helping to keep populations of saiga antelope, onagers, Przewalski horses, bison and red deer alive in Askania-Nova.
Takhi, also known as Przewalski’s wild horse.
(Wikipedia photo)
Przewalski’s horses
The International Fund for Animal Welfare [IFAW] claimed credit for helping the local environmental group Eco-Halych preserve “the largest meadow-steppe area in Central Europe” in the Ivano-Frankivsk region of southern Ukraine, relatively far from the fighting.
Eco-Halych director Volodymyr Buchko projects the area as a future protected habitat for “Przewalski’s horses, various types of deer and other herbivores.”
“Several animals rescued from the war or from inappropriate living conditions have already been released into the reserve, including one Przewalski’s horse, an injured hare, several roe deer and a mouflon wild sheep,” said an IFAW media release.
IFAW on January 28, 2024 also spotlighted having helped to relocate “three lions rescued from the combat zone in Donetsk Oblast, Ukraine, one male and two females,” who were taken on an 88-hour journey across the Polish border and relayed on “to an animal park near Dijon, Burgundy, France.”
Earlier, IFAW co-organized a two-day wildlife care workshop, partnering with ICF Save Wild, the Ukrainian Bat Rehabilitation Center, and Bear Sanctuary Domazhyr, held in Lviv in July 2023.
(Beth Clifton collage)
Caution about virtue-signaling
“As in any war, animals have suffered greatly in Ukraine, with hundreds of thousands of livestock — and millions of chickens — slaughtered in air strikes on industrial facilities and in wanton arson attacks. The bodies of hundreds of dolphins have washed up on Black Sea shorelines, the result of acoustic trauma from sonar,” observed freelance journalist Matt Broomfield back in August 2023.
But as “co-founder of the Rojava Information Center, the leading independent English-language news source in north and east Syria,” Broomfield urged caution about virtue-signaling from the war zone.
“Social media is awash with images of pets rescued from harm’s way by Ukrainian forces, animal charities and, in some instances, the Russian invaders,” Broomfield wrote, while recalling that “In the opening weeks of the conflict, certain neighboring countries opened their borders to pets accompanying their owners, but failed to extend the same courtesy to African students stranded by the invasion.
Beth & Merritt Clifton
“Dehumanizing the invaders”
“Sporadic assertions such as the claim Russian soldiers eat dogs, while their Ukrainian opponents rescue them, serve a readily apparent purpose in dehumanizing the invaders,” Broomfield noted. “In reality, one need not look far on social media to find equally propagandistic stories about Russian soldiers ‘saving’ dogs from ‘drunken’ Ukrainians.”
A certainty, however, is that hundreds of thousands of animals, of many species, remain caught in the path of the Russian invasion and the Ukrainian response.
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