Who let the dogs out ... in Moscow...

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NYC has their rats, crawling in the walls, subways, restaurant basements etc... And Moscow has their stray dogs. These poor cute little creatures are homeless and yet they're not the type you'd want to take home to your kids. In fact, you may not even want to take the subway and avoid certain streets, where they roam. Which can be pretty much anywhere. During the cold winter months, these dogs warm themselves by staying in packs in the shafts of the subway. Commuters and city dwellers pray to God each day, they don't get attacked by a hungry, vicious dog or pack of them, who are very likely to carry diseases. Forget about carrying lunch with you from home, they will smell the food and leave you torn apart, out of desperation. Instead some commuters have been carrying pieces of sausage and pepper spray to distract the animals.

The way the city has been handling this crisis, is by neutering the few dogs they're able to catch. Well that leaves thousands of others, and come spring time, there's litters of hundreds more around the city.

"Shooting stray dogs is no longer an option. That ended in 2002," Elena Vlasneva, responsible for homeless animals within the Moscow Municipality, told ABC News. "Policy has changed. And starting Jan. 1 this year, we are supposed to sterilize the dogs we catch."

Vlasneva adds that the demand for sterilization far outweighs the means. "Our estimate shows that the number of homeless dogs is growing. For the sterilization program to be successful it is necessary to sterilize 80 percent of dogs; that is 4,200 a month. Current facilities allow us to sterilize only 850 per month."

So the vicious problem continues...

(ABC News)