Order to cull pets in the exclusion zone

The Order to cull pets in the exclusion zone was an official response to the household animals left behind after people were evacuated from the land around the Chernobyl power plant. Presented as necessary to prevent an epidemic, the order sent hunters into deserted villages to kill dogs and cats. Its practical logic collided with the animals’ dependence on people: many waited by homes or ran toward the voices of those who came to shoot them. In the testimonies, the operation becomes a stark measure of how evacuation transformed familiar domestic life into a scene of state-directed killing.

Authorization and Deployment

A few months after the explosion, regional Party officials summoned Viktor Iosifovich Verzhikovskiy, head of the Khoyniki Society of Volunteer Hunters and Fisherman, and told him that pets remained in the exclusion zone. The dogs and cats had absorbed radiation in their fur and might wander out, the officials explained; the stated reason for exterminating them was to prevent an epidemic. The responsibility for carrying out the order fell to local hunters.

The assignment came without suitable protective equipment. Verzhikovskiy gathered the hunters, but none wanted to enter the zone unprotected. Civil defense had no respirators to provide, so he obtained masks from a cement factory: thin coverings meant to filter cement dust, not specialized equipment for this work. The contrast with the soldiers they met in the zone was immediate. Soldiers had masks, gloves, and armored personnel carriers; the hunters wore ordinary shirts and used handkerchiefs over their noses. They returned to their families in the same shirts and boots.

Verzhikovskiy organized two brigades of twenty men each. A veterinarian and a representative of the epidemic center accompanied each brigade, and their equipment included a tractor with a scoop and a dump truck. These arrangements gave the operation a formal, organized character, but they did not remedy its central deficiency: the people ordered to do the killing had not been supplied with adequate protection. The order thus combined administrative procedure with improvisation, assigning crews and vehicles while leaving hunters exposed.

The operation in abandoned villages

The two brigades spent two months moving through the exclusion zone, where dozens of villages in the hunters’ region had been evacuated, including Babchin and Tulgovichi. On the first visits, dogs still guarded the houses and ran toward the hunters’ voices, apparently welcoming people back. The crews shot them in houses, barns, and yards, then dragged the bodies into the street and loaded them onto a dump truck. The animals did not understand why familiar human voices now accompanied their deaths; their trust made them easy to kill.

At first, sealed houses limited what the hunters could do. If a cat was visible through a window, they could not reach it, and they left the seals untouched. Later, looters broke doors, windows, and window guards, taking record players, televisions, fur clothing, and eventually nearly everything else. In the opened houses, dogs that had survived moved inside and no longer trusted people. One hunter described entering a room where a female dog lay with her puppies around her. He felt sorry for her, but understood the scene through the logic of a military operation: the hunters had become punishers, surrounding villages and shooting at animals that fled into the forest. Cats hid beneath stoves or inside a clay pot; hunters pursued them with rifles. As the abandoned food supply disappeared, dogs and foxes ate chickens, and dogs began eating cats. These changing relations among animals were consequences of the evacuation, not simply obstacles to the assigned work.

The hunters did not kill every animal they encountered. They released otters from their enclosures when water was nearby, and let pigs out of barns, feeding them stored cucumbers and tomatoes. Their recollections also mention turtles and fish left in empty homes, reminders that the abandoned settlements contained many forms of life beyond the animals named in the order. Yet the distinction between sparing and killing did not make the operation humane: it was carried out under an extermination order, amid inadequate protection and without a reliable way to shield the animals from the violence of human return.

Killing and Disposal

The task became most harrowing at Masaly, a village six kilometers from the reactor, where a hunter recalled an iodine smell and an acrid sourness. Dogs had to be shot at point-blank range. One mother dog sprang toward him; after he shot her, her puppies licked their paws and played nearby, and he had to shoot them too. A small black poodle remained especially vivid in his memory. The crew filled a dump truck with animals and took them to a burial place that was, in practice, a deep hole in the ground.

The burial instructions called for an elevated site, protection against groundwater, and a cellophane lining, but the hunters did not have the lining and did not spend time finding a suitable location. When wounded animals cried as the bodies were dumped into the pit, the men had no bullets left. The little poodle tried to climb out; they pushed it back and buried it alive. The hunter’s repeated recollection of still feeling sorry for the dog makes the failure of procedure more than a technical detail: the order’s violence continued into its disposal, where even the prescribed safeguards were ignored and the animals’ suffering could not be brought to a clean end. He later summarized the strain of killing at close range: “It’s better to kill from far away, so your eyes don’t meet.”

The Order’s Moral and Narrative Significance

The culling order exposes the exclusion zone as a place where ordinary bonds had been overturned by administrative commands. Pets left behind when residents were evacuated still responded to human voices, sometimes running toward the hunters as if people had returned. The hunters’ task required them to turn that trust into a means of killing. In the hunters’ own account, the operation came to resemble a military action: villages were surrounded, animals fled at the first shots, and people entered homes with rifles. The comparison makes the order’s violence legible without making the animals into combatants; they were domestic creatures caught in a human emergency they could not understand.

The testimony also places the culling alongside other efforts to govern life in the evacuated landscape. Soldiers kept former residents from returning to their houses and possessions, while farmers were made to discard milk, bury eggs, and bury crops. The pet order belongs to this wider contradiction: people and animals were removed or controlled in the name of danger, while the land’s familiar routines—homes, livestock, food, and care—persisted in altered and often painful forms. Its significance lies not only in the deaths it ordered, but in how it records a state response that organized the treatment of living beings while leaving those carrying out the work without adequate protection and the animals without any possibility of understanding or escape.