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Hunting parties spent weeks scouring the zone and shot all the abandoned family pets, which had begun to roam in packs. It was a necessary evil to avoid the spread of radioactivity, prevent decontamination workers from being attacked, and put the animals out of their misery. A quick death was better than slowly dying of starvation and radiation sickness. βThe first time we came, the dogs were running around near their houses, guarding them, waiting for people to come backβ, recounted Viktor Verzhikovskiy, Chairman of the Khoyniki Society of Volunteer Hunters and Fishermen. βThey were happy to see us, they ran toward our voices. We shot them in the houses, and the barns, in the yards. Weβd drag them out onto the street and load them onto the dump truck. It wasnβt very nice. They couldnβt understand: why are we killing them? They were easy to kill, they were household pets. They didnβt fear guns or people.220β They didnβt all die this way. At the beginning of June, Nikolai Goshchitsky, a visiting engineer from the Beloyarsk nuclear power station, witnessed some which had escaped the bullets. β[They] crawled, half alive, along the road, in terrible pain. Birds looked as if they had crawled out of water... unable to fly or walk... Cats with dirty fir, as if it had been burnt in places.221β Animals that had survived that long were now blind.
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Andrew Leatherbarrow (Chernobyl 01:23:40: The Incredible True Story of the World's Worst Nuclear Disaster)