{"id":256,"date":"2007-01-11T11:35:27","date_gmt":"2007-01-11T07:35:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/?p=256"},"modified":"2007-01-11T11:35:27","modified_gmt":"2007-01-11T07:35:27","slug":"the-hounds-of-yuzhno-sakhalinsk","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/256\/","title":{"rendered":"The Hounds of Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk"},"content":{"rendered":"

Anyone who has spent even a small amount of time observing the goings on in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk would after a while notice the incredible number of dogs that are in the town.\u00a0 Everywhere you go outside, there are dogs, lots of them.\u00a0 Generally, there are three types of dog in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk.<\/p>\n

The first kind\u00a0is what you’d expect to see in any normal country, and that is a dog being taken for a walk by its owner, or the dog taking its owner for a walk as is often the case.\u00a0 These come in all different shapes and sizes, but for some reason they are often either so small you think somebody is taking a rat for a walk, or it is some enormous hairy beast half the size of a horse which looks as though it could swat you out of its way with one paw.\u00a0 I’m not too clued up on the different breeds of dogs, but there are a lot of mongrels scattered amongst the more recognisable breeds.\u00a0 Dog ownership is very popular in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, and dog walking is a popular pastime, even amongst the kids (one of whom recently almost disappeared under the wheels of my Landcruiser when her dog, six times bigger than her, shot into the road with her in tow).<\/p>\n

The second kind is the yard dog, which are always mongrels.\u00a0 Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk is an industrial town, hence there are dozens and dozens of warehouses and goods yards all over the place.\u00a0 Almost every one of these has a dog or several hanging about, whose job seems to be as much about keeping the security guard company as providing any security himself.\u00a0 We have premises at the rougher end of town opposite the power station, and the security hut there always has a three or four dogs\u00a0loafing about outside, usually sleeping in the snow.\u00a0 When we first\u00a0set up\u00a0our equipment yard at the LNG site in Prigorodnoye the yard manager found a small puppy sniffing around and adopted it.\u00a0 Two years later, it charges at anyone not wearing a company boiler suit.\u00a0 The secure parking areas where residents of Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk keep their vehicles at night usually have a few dogs snoozing on the steps of the security hut, and my parking area is no exception.\u00a0 Even our main office has a dog chained up outside, and I have no idea who it belongs to.\u00a0 These dogs don’t seem to bother the Russians one bit, they seem to be accepted as much as the snow and the bad roads, and I have never heard anybody suggest that they shouldn’t be there.<\/p>\n

The third kind is the stray dog, and these hang about in packs in any spare patch of land they happen upon.\u00a0 There is a pack of six or eight of them living just behind our apartment, I think underneath some shed or other (see picture below).<\/p>\n

\"Stray<\/a><\/p>\n

On the other side of our apartment another pack lives on a large piece of wasteland, and chase each other around it for hours.\u00a0 In fact, nearly every open area you go to has a pack of stray dogs occupying it, and often you see these trying to cross the roads, risking their lives to do so.\u00a0 I even saw a family of dogs living in an underground burrow in the grounds of the regional hospital.\u00a0 These packs of dogs sleep all day, as the picture shows, but at night they start running around and fighting other dogs and it creates one hell of a racket.\u00a0 In my last apartment, at 4:00am every morning without fail\u00a0this damned stray dog would start yelping and running around like it was possessed by demons.\u00a0 Things are slightly better in this apartment but not by much.\u00a0 Apparently in the larger Russian cities the authorities round up and destroy the stray dogs, but in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk they are free to roam, breed, fight, and make a racket whenever and wherever they please, and indeed they do.\u00a0 How they survive the cold, and what they eat, is anyone’s guess.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Anyone who has spent even a small amount of time observing the goings on in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk would after a while notice the incredible number of dogs that are in the town.\u00a0 Everywhere you go outside, there are dogs, lots of … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[46],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/256"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=256"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/256\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=256"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=256"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=256"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}