The Food For Dog

This decorated stand is located just outside the Duga Radar checkpoint, also known as ‘the Russian woodpecker’ – a Soviet missile detection system that never actually functioned. It greets tourists off the tour bus at one of the Zone’s most prominent attractions and consists of a number of items collected from abandoned buildings. Specifically, the stand functions as a ‘collection box’ where tourists can donate money in the hat to feed Tarzan, perhaps the Zone’s most famous dog that many tourists already know from social media and online profiles. Tarzan lives by the checkpoint and is fed and partially sheltered by the guards who are stationed there. He is one of an estimated 600 stray dogs living in the Zone. But how did they come to live in Chernobyl?

During the evacuation of Chernobyl in 1986, evacuees from Pripyat and surrounding villages within the 30km Exclusion Zone were instructed to leave their pets behind by the Soviet government and later, soldiers were sent to cull any remaining animals for fears they would spread radioactive contamination outside of the Zone. Today, the descendants of the original abandoned pets that survived the cull roam the Zone having been driven out of the wilderness by predators and a lack of food and water towards the 2,000 commuting workers on site at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant (ChNPP) every day. The majority of them live close to checkpoints and other semi-populated areas such as Chernobyl town where they are fed and cared for by certain residents. If at one point feral, the dogs in the Zone today are mainly tame and outdoor-living domestic dogs. As free-roaming dogs in a mainly abandoned area, however, they often come into conflict with wolves, who have also (re)colonised the Zone in wake of humanity’s exodus, establishing a population seven times greater than those found in surrounding uncontaminated nature reserves. It is suspected that some of them have interbred with wolves, although the dog-wolf relation is largely represented by the threat of predation posed by wolves to dogs.

The stand at the checkpoint thus features a picture of a wolf, whose gaze intentionally greets tourists as they depart their tour buses. The image of the predator is deployed here to make tourists aware of the ongoing threat of wolf predation posed to the free-roaming dogs. It does so to draw sympathy, and accompanying donations, from the relatively wealthy visiting tourists. By keeping dogs well-fed, it is hoped they won’t stray far from humans in search of food, increasing their risk of coming into contact with wolves. There is a commensality involved with the ecologies of Chernobyl that draws attention to the ongoing lives and human-animal relations that are formed in toxic places. These relationships, moreover, contest representations of Chernobyl as either a wilderness or a wasteland by highlighting how humans, dogs and wolves co-exist (for the most part) in the area.

As many tourists are aware of Tarzan already, his charisma (Lorimer, 2007) is integral to the experience of the Zone, with some visiting primarily to meet, pet, and feed him. Chernobyl is composed of a number of affective human-animal relationships that have greatly benefited the booming tourist industry in the area. This demonstrates the agency of nonhumans in ‘making’ toxic places when it comes to a particular kind of tourist interested in visiting Chernobyl.

References

Lorimer, J. (2007) Nonhuman Charisma. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 25(5): 911–932.