The dogs of Sochi are disappearing

SOCHI, Russia — Without fail, more reliably than my own stubborn bull terrier Obie at home in Toronto ever does, they come when called, tails wagging.

I have met a dozen dogs thus far in Sochi and Krasnaya Polyana, the mountain resort where the snow sports are being held and where I’m staying for the first while, and all are universally sweetnatured and nice.

One, a black pup, sat companionably by my side in the sun the other day. Once in a while, with a sigh of contentment, he rested his head on my leg.

Another puppy, who looked like a near-pure Golden Retriever, tried to follow me onto the bus back to the Postmedia News apartment; a couple of volunteers distracted him so I could sneak aboard, and by then, his puppy attention span kicked in and he forgot about me.

Two others I encountered near a volunteers’ village housing complex in Rosa Khutor were mangy and thin, but still had enough play left in them to recognize what the heck a glove is for — pulling at with puppy teeth.

The mother dog outside the Gorki press centre is the one I see most regularly, because in the mountains, all media buses start and finish at the GPC.

Probably for that reason, and because she has a brood of glorious and photogenic pups, she’s become quite famous, and has had her picture flashed online and in newspapers across the world.

She’s lovely, and such a good mother.

The first morning I saw her with the sturdy pups, it was behind the security tent. She stood protectively by while they were lapping up what I think was drain water.

The first time I brought her some of the small sausages from breakfast, she sat ramrod straight before me, tail thumping, as I unwrapped them.

One by one, without chewing them, she popped all three in her mouth and then took off at a trot to take them to her babes.

By this time I was documenting what I call the Dogs of Sochi on Twitter (trust me, only mutts could have got me tweeting), and she let me get close enough to take a picture.

There were three pups then; they are Nos. 8, 9, 10 and 11 on my Twitter feed.

When Ed Kaiser, the Edmonton Journal/Postmedia photog, took a (much better) picture of them just the day before in the same spot, there were four.

Cathy Boucek, from the digital side of our chain, had a favourite — a little dachshund mix who hung around the Sochi apartment and whom she saw every morning.

She hasn’t seen him in days, and has noticed that in Sochi, as I have noticed in Krasnaya Polyana, there are fewer and fewer dogs around, period.

It appears that there’s a quiet battle underway, between the pest control exterminator hired to round up the strays and the animal rescue group trying to save them.

This has all been welldocumented, of course, by the world press in the days leading up to the start of the Sochi Games.

This, like stories about bad hotel rooms or weather or security, are a predictable part of what happens when thousands of crabby reporters descend upon a city in advance of a huge event such as the Olympics.

Remember the Vancouver Games?

The British press in particular if not exclusively had the Games, the city and the country all but written off as a schemozzle before the opening ceremonies.

Those Olympics turned out to be a smashing success and, but for the one legitimate tragedy, the death of luger Nodar Kumaritashvili, most of the doom-and-gloom was revealed as hysterical over-reaction.

That’s what we in this business do, especially now, with the relentless demands of the web and social media: we hysterically over-react.

And once the competitions begin here, the darting attention of the press will flit off the dogs and onto the next thing.

That’s why I started taking their pictures, really. I wanted there to be some evidence that once, they walked the planet.

I wanted people to know that the big spotty black-andwhite one was my first, that the black pup who sat in the sun with me was dirty, with sore-looking eyes, and that I nicknamed the little Golden Vladimir and that when my friend and colleague, Vicki Hall, laughed and told some Russian girls who were nearby that the dog was now Vlad, after the Russian president, they gaped in horror.

I wanted to remind people that puppies are puppies the world over and always know what to do with a glove, that Cathy adored the dachshund, that the mama dog was doing a magnificent job with her kids.

It sounds ridiculous (no, it is ridiculous), but I wanted whatever is the equivalent of humanity in dogs — caninity? — to be recognized.

As it turns out, my little self-assigned project is a heartbreaking business and just makes me so bloody sad.

As we are all the same under the skin, whatever colour of the rainbow it is, whether we are gay or straight, as we are responsible for one another, so do we bear a particular duty to care for the vulnerable among us, whether they are the elderly of L’Isle-Verte, the poor little Toronto boy known as Jeffrey Baldwin, or the Dogs of Sochi.

Ah well: They will disappear soon enough. If only it were just from the headlines.