The photo showing a girl in a sheepskin coat evacuating disabled dogs from Irpin town to Kyiv went viral all over the world. The work by American photographer Christopher Occhicone was published in March 2022 by the Wall Street Journal. The photograph went viral on social media too. It spotlights a 20-year-old volunteer Nastya (Anastasiya) Tykha. At that time, she and her husband Artur took out and evacuated 24 animals.
The story didn't end there! For almost a month, the couple rescued animals under shelling in Irpen, Bucha and Borodianka. Almost died! At the time of the recording of the interview, new wards appeared in the shelter: dogs from regions where active hostilities are taking place.
My husband and I were evacuating our entire animal shelter from Irpin, and when we were passing through the destroyed bridge in Romanivka, an American photojournalist photographed us.
This photo quickly went viral around the world. In this photo, I am standing together with all the dogs. There are 19 of them. And these dogs are pulling me in different directions because the photographer does not let me pass. It turned out to be such a photo showing me standing like that, but in fact, the dogs were pulling the leashes. My proudly raised head is a moment when I had a tough talk with the photographer. I was standing like that and saying, “Let me go my way.”
We were walking with a lot of animals. Some of these animals were aggressive. One car pulled over and asked if we had a place where to go. Basically, we thought that we would go to Kyiv on foot. I mean, people stopped and asked.
One man helped us. He rolled a shopping trolley with cats in it, and my husband took the rest of the dogs. We walked three and a half kilometres for almost three hours.
We have a mini-shelter and offer pet boarding too. That is why we have all these animals. It is for sick animals, animals with some physical and mental peculiarities, aggressive animals, zoo-aggressors, and animals with disabilities. It is for dogs with any physical disabilities, like legless, blind and deaf dogs.
My parents still have 27 dogs, until now. Previously, they had a mastiff kennel. These are quite large-size dogs. I gained my dog handling experience from there. They needed constant medical treatment. From there, I got some experience in the behaviour of the dogs. They loved to fight among themselves. Then I met my husband. He was allergic to cats and he did not want to get a dog either. I had to put up with it. We discussed this, that someday we will buy an apartment and then we will get a dog.
I entered an educational institution to study for a veterinarian and we started looking for a job. I thought, “Why not go to work with animals right away?” We found an advertisement about pet boarding needed for a dog. That is, people were going on leave, on a vacation, and the dog needed to temporarily stay somewhere. My husband was like, “Oh, let’s try it” – “Okay, Arthur, let’s try.” For half a year, we did just that. We would take a pet to keep it for a week, and then we took the first cat as volunteers.
We did not recall the allergy at all, but it turned out that I was allergic to cats too. Nevertheless, we continued to do this. Then we came across an advertisement about a house for rent and we moved in there.
When Irpin was under attack and its siege was looming, we heard the machine-gun bursts. Nevertheless, the dogs kept going out into the yard, as they needed to go to the toilet. I stood and watched them. There was no reaction at all. Surprisingly, the dogs quickly got used to it.
We had three disabled dogs at that time. Two of them were with broken spines. One had been run down by a car, the second dog had been hit with a stick and taken to the forest. We found it like that. The third one had no hind legs, and another disabled dog was without one hind leg.
I would like to say that when a dog is without a hind leg, it is not very noticeable. It still jumps and runs; it loves you just the same way. Basically, Snezhana organized our entire evacuation campaign.
Snezhana is a volunteer with whom we had worked for a very long time. At the time when we were under enemy occupation, she even became our friend. She said, “You have no water and soon there will be no food. You need to leave.” In four days, she found us a place where we could stay. She organized a vehicle to Romanivka; she “fought” with the territorial defence unit and they agreed that this particular vehicle would be let through.
This photo helped these animals get noticed and people began to adopt them. Now all these dogs live abroad, in Croatia, Poland, and London.
All this time these dogs lived in Ukraine and no one needed them. Thanks to this photo, they got noticed, and they left to live in families.
We have a new charge in ward now. We have a new category of dogs that we take. These are dogs from war hot spots, from Kharkiv, Mykolaiv, and Mariupol. The first month of the war was a nightmare. Pets were thrown out or abandoned by their owners. Then people banded together, stopped panicking and began to adopt pets. In just a month, we, together with other volunteers, managed to find new adoptive pet owners for more than 100 animals.
Now everyone has come to their senses, this feeling [of panic] has passed and everyone began to think about the future. Those animals that ended up on the street, no one sterilized them in fact. So now, we have 24 new puppies in a month’s time. This is a real baby boom, and, of course, it is a disaster. This is a shepherd dog. It was found near Borodyanka when it was already pregnant, and so it has puppies now. We had a period when we kept coming back to Irpin and bringing food to local residents, as well as animal feed. And there were animals that needed help...
We had tight restrictions on pets. For example, Husky dog. Husky dogs can do just fine on the street, outside; and the Chihuahua that I found in a house is already in a new family in Poland.
Once we were walking with a shepherd dog. Its owner gave it to me. The owner is an old woman and their house was destroyed.
So my husband and I were walking when mortar shelling began. He and another volunteer jumped into a trench, and the shepherd dog remained sitting next to me. It did not want to go, so I sat next to it and we stayed like that for some time. The military looked at me from the trenches like I was an idiot. And I was like, “I’ll sit here, everything is fine, thank God. Things worked out fine.”
My husband and I had another case that was even worse. It was the day before the liberation of Irpin. Our next visit to Irpin was unlucky as on the way back we came under mortar fire in Romanivka. My husband and I, together with the military, stayed between a house and the car, a bunch of dogs near us. The dogs were calm, they mostly slept. They were used to it and were no longer interested. And then the house behind us collapsed. A mortar shell struck the house. The explosion swept the fence and all that flew at our backs. After that incident, we decided to take a break and not to go there. Well, after that, Irpin was liberated, and that was it. My husband and I were sitting and thinking about it. He was smoking and all those thoughts [swarmed] in his mind, the understanding of it: well, well, we shall live on and everything should be fine.
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