After the Twix story, FPK changed the procedure for dealing with animals without an owner

The Federal Passenger Company (FPK; a subsidiary of Russian Railways) has changed the procedure for conductors when animals without owners are detected on the territory of departments and on long-distance trains. The FPC press service reported this TASS.

“If a stray animal is found on a train, train crew employees will take all necessary measures to find the owners… If the owner cannot be found, the animal will be moved to a specialized luggage compartment or to service places in the headquarters car, taken to the station, where it will be handed over to the staff on duty station,” the company said.

The press service clarified that the handlers will check the tags on the animal’s collar and the information in the passenger boarding control devices. In addition, train and station employees will question passengers. They noted that the owner himself is primarily responsible for maintaining the animal.

On January 11, on the Ekaterinburg-St. Petersburg train, the cat Twix got out of his carrier. The conductor decided that the cat had run into the train while it was parked and kicked him out of the carriage. On January 20, Twix’s body was found in the snow near the railroad tracks. On January 23, Russian Railways temporarily suspended the conductor from working on passenger trains. The cat’s owner contacted the police, but there refused to initiate a criminal case under the article on arbitrariness (Article 330 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation) due to the lack of corpus delicti.

Read more in the Kommersant article. “Cats can now”.

Petr Buzlaev