Budget down the drain

Barrier cordons, promises to compensate farmers for damage caused by the destruction of pigs from their farms, expenses for special transport and other measures - all these measures require huge amounts of money from the city budget. But the veterinarians who made a fuss about African swine fever (ASF) allegedly appearing in the Leningrad region did not justify such expenses with anything - except for instructions from the times of the Soviet Union. It turns out that poor knowledge of legislation by veterinary department specialists is literally diluting the budget of St. Petersburg into expenses that could have been avoided.

Whether swine fever will be confirmed or not is another question. But the funds from the reserve fund have already been spent from the heart



Complete quarantine
One cordon, another - there is a police station on the Volkhonskoye Highway and the adjacent roads. When asked by local residents whether they knew what such measures were related to, residents of the villages of Toriki and Volodarsky only shrugged their shoulders: yes, they watched stories about the plague on TV. When asked to name in which yard the pigs were actually killed, the locals waved their hands vaguely - somewhere in the area of ​​the Volkhonskoye Highway.
But victims of the violent activity of veterinarians were also found in Volodarsky itself, next to the main square.
“They killed 14 of our pigs and took away the carcasses,” says Alexander Vladimirovich, the owner of the house. “We understand that since there is an epidemic, this means this is necessary, they promised to pay us for it.
Conversations about what really happened with swine fever are going around the village in a variety of ways: some say that some owner threw sick animals into a landfill, teenagers tell scary stories about animals being burned in the local boiler room, others claim that pigs removed from farms were burned directly at a landfill nearby. Indeed, almost next to Toriki there is MPBO-2, that is, a waste processing plant. It seems that this is where the corpses of the killed pigs were taken. What happened to them next - we can only guess: the territory adjacent to the plant is also cordoned off by the police - there are barrage cordons on all roads and entrances. The police officers on duty explained that these were temporary measures until a proper fence was built and security was posted. They also said that on weekdays cars drive into the cordoned off area and that, according to their information, there is a large pit in which animal corpses are burned. But the roads leading into the cordoned off area are covered in snow, and it doesn't look like heavy equipment was used to dig through the frozen ground.

The dogs have become extreme
— We barely pumped out our Zhuzhik. — Svetlana, the owner of a car wash located on the square of the village of Volodarsky, points to her guard dog - a large dog with a solid mixture of Caucasian Shepherd. “Can you imagine, right in the middle of the day, when the schoolchildren were returning home, these people shot at the dogs!”
The unfortunate Zhuzhik, who caught the eye of Special Transport employee Vladimir Novikov, ran into the car wash with a syringe in his side. And this same “shooter” ran after him. When he saw the workers, he stopped the chase and asked whose dog it was. Having learned that the dog belonged to the owners of the car wash, Spetstrans employee Vladimir Novikov said that he needed to account for the wasted ampoule of medicine and therefore he would either take the dog or let them pay him. Having taken a thousand rubles, Novikov stated that he was ready to sell information about killed and taken away dogs at a reasonable price - a thousand rubles per animal.
They pumped Zhuzhik out for three days - he is big, and there was not enough ditilin, from which medium-sized dogs die in terrible agony, to die. Other dogs were not so lucky: according to the stories of local residents, about one and a half dozen dogs in different parts of the village were brutally killed.
At the public gathering that took place yesterday near the Oktyabrsky Concert Hall with the participation of deputy Oleg Peshey, about a thousand people gathered. The participants of the gathering actively signed an appeal addressed to Governor Valentina Matvienko with a request to stop the destruction of defenseless animals, introduce public control over the work of Special Transport and conduct an investigation into the activities of the Veterinary Department to combat ASF.

Natalya SHKURENOK

Direct speech
Svetlana MIROLYUBOVA, Candidate of Legal Sciences:
— In accordance with the Resolution of the Supreme Council of the Russian Federation of May 14, 1993 No. 4979/1-1 “On the procedure for enacting the Law of the Russian Federation “On Veterinary Medicine”, the Veterinary Charter of the USSR has not been applied since the entry into force of the Law. The Government of the Russian Federation had to bring regulations into compliance with this law within three months, as well as ensure the revision and repeal of regulations that contradict it. In accordance with Part 3 of Article 15 of the Constitution of the Russian Federation, any regulatory legal acts affecting the rights, freedoms and duties of man and citizen cannot be applied unless they are officially published for public information. That is, only one provision of the Constitution of the Russian Federation is sufficient, according to which it can be said that the Instruction on measures for the prevention and elimination of African swine fever of November 21, 1980 has no legal force and cannot be applied on the territory of the Russian Federation: The Instruction is a subordinate legal act, it automatically ceases to be valid after the repeal of the Veterinary Statute. Due to the fact that this Instruction directly affects the right of ownership, it can be said that in accordance with Article 3.1. The Law of the Russian Federation “On Veterinary Medicine”, the powers transferred from the Russian Federation to the constituent entities of the Russian Federation do not imply the destruction of dogs and cats as restrictive quarantine measures.