Monuments As Thanks to Cats

Second monument to cats unveiled in St.Petersburg
St.Petersburg is a foggy and mystical city. Popular Russian singer Yury Shevchuk compared the city with a black dog, but black cats are a favorite symbol in St.Petersburg as well.

St.Petersburg citizens like very much that cats add special peculiarity to the city.

A monument to cats was unveiled outside the St.Petersburg State University as a symbol of gratitude to all laboratory animals on whom experiments are conducted. Rector of the University Lyudmila Verbitskaya, representatives of the St.Petersburg veterinary inspection, members of the St.Petersburg cat-fancier club and the initiator of the monument creation, Russian Academy of Sciences academician Alexander Nozdrachev took part in the ceremonial unveiling of the monument. The people said their thanks to animals sacrificed to the science. Alexander Nozdrachev said: “The mankind should be extremely thankful to cats which presented the world with a great amount of important physiology discoveries.”

The sculpture of a cat is about one meter high, it is set up on a two-meter granite pedestal with boards with sayings about cats by Conrad Lorenz, Bernard Shaw and other figures of culture and science.

It may sound blasphemous, but when St.Petersburg citizens look at the monument, they will certainly remember cats that saved human lives, those cats whom the city citizens had to eat to survive in the days of the Leningrad severe blockade in WWII.

This is the second monument set up to cats in St.Petersburg. The first one is on the eaves of a building standing at the corner of Nevsky Avenue and Malaya Sadovaya Street. It is just a good-natured well-fed cat of a natural size; it watches the fuss and the birds from its secluded hook. It is one of the most wonderful monuments set up in St.Petersburg within the past years. St.Petersburg is marvelous city, and its monuments are amazing as well.

Yelena Kiseleva PRAVDA.Ru

Translated by Maria Gousseva

Read the original in Russian: https://www.pravda.ru/news/sport/7287-kat/

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