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Photo a day from Sochi: Who let the dogs out?

What’s the sweetest, loveliest rolling mass of fur you’ve ever seen? How about a litter of seven puppies, waking up inside a massive industrial pipe near the Georgian border to scamper toward you in a fit of adorableness? You see this and you squeal.

What’s the sweetest, loveliest rolling mass of fur you’ve ever seen?

 

How about a litter of seven puppies, waking up inside a massive industrial pipe near the Georgian border to scamper toward you in a fit of adorableness? You see this and you squeal. Like I did:

 

puppy licking hand

 

 

puppies

 

These yipping, stumbling pups were the first dogs I cuddled here in Sochi. I returned the next day with a pocketful of bologna and cooed as the puppies chomped on what might have been their first solid food. They were still nursing.

Other reporters and supervisors on my team have also fallen in love with these abandoned and stray animals. They’re everywhere and they’re clearly taken care of and even cherished by the people who live in this neighbourhood.

 

puppy seawall

 

The international press has also adopted them. An Australian named the three who live at our housing complex. They’re Cracker, Jasper and Bruce.  

 

And they’re missing.

 

missing dog

 

The three that played and slept at our bus stop every morning weren’t around to eat the sausages we brought them. They are gone.

 

The mother with the engorged teats near the beach and Georgian border. She is gone.

 

Her puppies. We saw only one. The rest, gone.

 

The hand hired to eliminate the dogs called them “biological trash and in an interview with ABC News gave the preposterous example of what could go wrong if a stray – despite how impossibly – ran beneath a ski jumper as he returned to Earth.

 

It’d be laughable if this example wasn’t actually used as justification to kill countless animals.

 

The extermination has apparently been going on for months.

 

The exterminator also told the Associated Press, "A dog ran into the Fisht Stadium; we took it away," he said. "God forbid something like this happens at the actual opening ceremony. This will be a disgrace for the whole country."

 

The disgrace is the deaths of these dogs.

 

puppy dusk seawall