Russian Bureaucrats Don’t Feel Animals’ Pain

Natalia Bendik was told that there was no anesthetic available to perform surgery on her 17-year-old dog, but the clinic had a muscle relaxant that would at least immobilize him while his painful tumor was removed.

As the drug was administered, Bendik said, the animal went into convulsions, then began to struggle for breath. “He was shivering all over, and his eyes were wide open. He couldn’t breathe. The dog died, and the death was horrible,” she said this week, angrily brushing back tears.

Federal drug agents have launched a series of raids on veterinary clinics in recent months, conducting undercover stings and seizing an anesthetic that is often illegally sold on the street to pleasure-seekers. The government crackdown was stepped up a week ago, leaving most veterinarians with little or no access to surgical painkillers or barbiturates.

As a result, animal welfare advocates say, a few simple surgical procedures are now being performed with no anesthetic -- using an immobilizing drug that is legal but does not substantially relieve pain -- and many clinics are refusing to perform surgeries at all, leaving hundreds of sick and injured pets without surgical care.

“Today, when clients bring their pets who need surgery to us, we apologize profusely and tell them no,” Ilya L. Kvichko, director of Moscow’s Beladonna veterinary clinic, said in an interview. “We say that we are ready to perform a surgery without this drug, but we honestly warn clients that operating on animals without it is sheer sadism.”

At issue is ketamine, a psychotropic drug widely used around the world as a general anesthetic in both humans and animals that is also increasingly popular as a street drug. Veterinarians in the U.S. have decreased their reliance on it in recent years in response to a rash of clinic break-ins and because more effective anesthetics are widely available.

In Russia, however, ketamine has been virtually the only animal anesthetic in use at small clinics for years. Inhaled gas anesthetics commonly used in the U.S. are not available at most Russian clinics and also are illegal.

Ketamine has been illegal for veterinary use in Russia since 1998, though it is legally licensed for human use. With no real alternative, most veterinarians have quietly acquired the drug on the black market while the government looked the other way.

In recent months, however, federal drug agents have begun enforcing the law, launching a series of raids that was drastically stepped up on Dec. 21. Agents have seized all stocks of ketamine and filed criminal charges against at least six doctors, with potential penalties of up to three years in prison.

“The situation is completely ludicrous and idiotic. It has always been clear to everyone, including the authorities, that veterinary clinics operating in Russia were existing on semi-legal grounds. On the one hand, they were licensed to perform surgeries on animals, but on the other hand, the drugs that they had to use for these surgeries were illegal in the country,” said Sergei L. Mendosa, director of the White Fang veterinary clinic.

“In fact, if ketamine or similar analgesics are not used in surgeries, then clearly animals suffer to an incomparably greater extent during surgery -- in fact, it is as if you are operating on a live animal without any drugs at all,” Mendosa said.

The muscle relaxant administered to Bendik’s dog was suggested by authorities as a legal alternative and is normally used in combination with other drugs and provides no pain relief on its own, Mendosa said. “The only difference is that an animal cannot move, and cannot show what terrible physical pain it is in.”

Irina Novozhilova, president of the Vita Center for Protection of Animal Rights, said her family veterinarian arrived at her home last month to spay a stray cat, and refused to administer any drug but the legal muscle relaxant.

“He said everything would be OK. He gave the cat four injections and the cat began having convulsions. We stopped the surgery. We realized that the cat was going to be completely conscious while we were operating,” she said.

Veterinarians have petitioned the Ministry of Agriculture, which is responsible for listing those drugs legally approved for veterinary use, to act quickly to include ketamine on the list of approved drugs.

Ministry spokesmen would not comment, but officials of the state drug control commission, which has conducted the crackdown, said they were simply enforcing the law. Ketamine’s potential for human abuse makes strict enforcement necessary, commission spokesman Vasily Sorokin said.

“Ketamine ... is illegal to use ... for animal surgery purposes. But veterinarians use it anyway. Thus they violate the law, and we have to step in and prevent it,” Sorokin said.

He would not say what precipitated the round of searches, but animal welfare officials said it was probably the recent increase in staff and funding at the commission. Veterinarians said their own research showed that ketamine had been identified in only a handful of drug abuse arrests in Russia in recent years. No similar raids have been reported at human hospitals. One new anesthetic drug was licensed two weeks ago in Russia as a possible alternative to ketamine, and another drug combination is also on the approved list. Both are less effective and at least four times more expensive, several veterinarians said, potentially raising the price of a simple cat surgery to nearly a quarter of a middle-class family’s monthly income.

As a result, a large number of Moscow clinics have gone on strike, refusing to perform surgeries until the government acts to legalize ketamine. Others are performing them only with clients they know, who buy their own ketamine on the black market.

“Today, we no longer do surgeries. None at all. As soon as the situation started to look menacing, I ordered the staff to remove all ketamine from the premises so that no one would have any questions about us,” Kvichko said.

Galina Zabavnova, a 76-year-old pensioner, stood quietly next to her dog at a north Moscow clinic this week. Five days earlier, she said, she was walking the dog when a car “came out of nowhere” and struck the animal.

“Her eye came out of the socket and was just hanging there, blood was running down. The first clinic I went to, they said there was no way they could carry out a surgery. This was 9:30 in the morning. I carried this dog all over town that day, no one would operate on her. Everyone was telling me they couldn’t perform surgeries,” Zabavnova said.

Finally, she said, she found a veterinarian, Kamil Galimov, who agreed to try. He used a combination of muscle relaxant and a local anesthetic.

“I was able to specifically anesthetize the eye nerve. Because we didn’t have ketamine, the dog felt some of it. But ... the dog didn’t bark, didn’t complain,” Galimov said.

“Right now, we are between the hammer and the anvil. On the one hand, you can go to prison for three years for cruel treatment of animals, and on the other hand, there’s the law against illegal use of a psychotropic substance,” he said. “It’s just the stupidity of bureaucrats.”

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Times staff writer Sergei L. Loiko and Alexei V. Kuznetsov of The Times’ Moscow Bureau contributed to this report.