A family moved into a chimney at the Wrotków power station in Lublin. The family’s fortunes could be monitored day and night due to the surveillance cameras installed at the facility, and so Poles observed them eating, arguing, and gazing into the distance. Thousands of people posted on social media, writing things like: “You slave away at work, and whenever you take a look they are lying around like they’re on the beach”, “the father forgot the shopping list, that’s men for you”, “the little ones are still on their own. The poor things are cuddling each other”, “I’m going out of my mind with fear about Wrotka and the children”.   

Wrotka and Czart are peregrine falcons, very rare birds, subject to strict protection. Few Poles have probably seen them in real life, and even if they discerned the silhouette of a falcon in the sky, they almost certainly would not be able to identify it. The story of Czart and Wrotka took the Internet by storm, and at times was called the top reality show of the season. 

Episode one: for some unknown reason the female has left the nest, Czart has been sitting on the eggs for forty hours.  

Episode two: ornithologists taking care of the nest take the eggs to an incubation centre, because eventually the male will have to leave the nest to eat. 

Episode three: the chicks are born in human, and not falcon conditions (thousands of Poles are able to observe this at home).  

Episode four:  Wrotka returns to the nest after a few days and sits on replica bird eggs that have been placed there, so that people can observe whether she still has the maternal instinct. She does, and she sits (the babies, being fed by humans, see and hear the mother on a screen).  

Episode five: The chicks are placed in the nest, along with pieces of broken eggshell and food in the form of a dead bird. Poles comment on the mother’s meeting with the babies on the Facebook page “Sokole Oko” (Eagle eye): “I wish I could do that.  Give birth, go out for a while, and then come back to find a nine-year-old, as well as a fully-stocked fridge”.  

But the charming life that people want to see in this animal family is short-lived. After a few days of sharing the task of caring for the chicks, Czart the falcon is found by a power station employee, and has symptoms of poisoning. He dies a short time later. This is another in a series of poisonings of peregrine falcons in Lublin. In 2021, Wrotka’s previous partner – Łupka, and one of the chicks, was killed in this way, and two chicks two years before that (at that time the female barely survived). Toxicology tests showed that the birds had been poisoned with carbofuran – a highly toxic pesticide that is banned in the European Union. 

Following Czart’s death, Katarzyna Czarniecka, administrator of the website “Sokole Oko”, started a collection to raise money for a reward for information that would help to catch the person killing falcons. Within a few days, Poles had donated PLN 61 230.  

Impunity 

The bad news is that the chances that the culprit or culprits will be caught and proven guilty are negligible, and there is an equal chance that they will be severely punished. According to information collected by Fundacja Czarna Owca Pana Kota (Mr Cat’s Black Sheep Foundation) and Stowarzyszenie EKOSTRAŻ (Ekostraż Animal Protection Association) – organisations for legal protection of animals, for years only one in five investigations (21.5 percent of the total) has resulted in a case being prosecuted in court. The other cases are either not pursued in courts by the state prosecutor’s office (29 percent), or simply closed (41.2 percent). These two organisations spent one and half years monitoring 334 Polish courts and district prosecutor’s offices, observing the progress in cases of harm to animals. A report was produced called “Impunity. Crimes committed against animals. Monitoring the legal system and law enforcement agencies”. This is part of the “Do They Have Rights? We’re Checking!” project carried out using grants under the Active Citizens programme.  Activists in the two organisations submitted requests to certain institutions to be provided with public information, and specifically information about the cases registered and concluded in the years 2016 – 2021, concerning harm done to animals. During this period, 9632 cases were registered in the district prosecutor’s offices surveyed, while they obtained 1903 judgments from the district courts being monitored.  – that was months of hard work that took an emotional toll, and of psychologically draining reading. Knowing the enormous suffering the animals experienced before dying is devastating. The accounts of abuse of animals made your hair stand up on end, and also increased the anger at how lightly the justice system treats cases of this kind. I still cannot stop thinking about a horse burnt in a stable by its owner, or a cow lying with its leg stuck between the floor and gate to a tunnel at an abattoir, when an abattoir employee deliberately used the gate to shatter the cow’s leg. 

 – Joanna Wydrych of Czarna Owca Pana Kota recalls. 

The report produced due to the activists’ work is also not easy reading. It shows a side of Poland that we do not want to see, full of sadism and barbarity. And evil. For example, one person killed a puppy by bashing it against a wall and then stamping on it. Another sliced a duck’s skin from the neck to the shoulders and then shut the mutilated and bleeding animal in a waste container. Another pierced a cow’s uterus with a wooden pole, another, number four, beat two hedgehogs to death with a hammer, and number five put the bitch Lusia in a washing machine and shut the door, leaving it to die. Number six chased a boar through a field in an off-road vehicle until it collapsed, and then got out and cut its throat. The seventh, eighth, fiftieth, and hundredth case. Neglect, mutilation, cruelty – a whole range of acts of cruelty of which a person is capable. 

It appears that usually Poles harm pets such as dogs and cats, or these are the cases reported most frequently. It is less common to hurt farm animals (or – as described above). Cruelty to wild animals only takes place sporadically (ditto). Acts of particular cruelty are committed mainly by people living in rural areas (either they are less aware, or they are able to hire a good lawyer). The culprits are adults, past forty, or past fifty, and a vast majority are men.  

The report includes a note saying: “we dedicate our work to all of the animals harmed by humans, all of those animals that were unfortunate enough to come across a person who tortured them and then killed or mutilated them; to those animals that had to endure unimaginable pain in the last moments of their life”.  

The culprits are protected, and not the victims 

What motives do Poles have for hurting wild and free animals? According to the report, this is mainly due to sadism or to kill an animal considered a pest. For people who breed chickens, this might be a ferret or a fox. For breeders of carrier pigeons – a peregrine falcon. For a farmer – a boar.  

–  the sentences for crimes committed against animals are usually suspended sentences, and in practice this means that the court merely issues a notice and no further action is taken. 

 A punishment of this kind does not educate in any way, and in particular it has no severe consequences for the culprits – Tomasz Argasiński of Czarna Owca Pana Kota and joint architect of the project, says. – We also checked the amounts of fines imposed:  usually, they do not exceed PLN 1000, and this amount has not changed for twelve years. This is not a severe punishment either – Joanna Wydrych adds. 

“When reading the overall vague statements of reasons for rulings stating that cases will not be prosecuted or closing investigations into animal cases, one cannot help but get the impression that the culprits, and not the victims, are being protected” – the report says. “I recall a case of a boy who stole two telephones, and also beat a dog and cat to death. In the statement of reasons for the judgment, the court stated that he was convicted of stealing the two telephones, and completely disregarded the death of the animals – Argasiński says in disgust. – in cases of abuse of animals such as pigs, cows, or chickens bred for food for humans, the level of the punishment is also very low. It looks a little as if courts take the view that these animals live solely for the purpose of ending up on people’s dinner plates, and the fact that they are abused does not substantially change the fact that people consider them to be the living dead anyway, waiting to be killed – Wydrych adds. 

In what way are Poles cruel? 

In fact, the cases of some controversial statements of reasons issued by courts have been widely reported. In 2019, a man faced charges in court after adopting a year-old female husky from a shelter. The husky’s name was Kejti. A month later he took her to the attic and threw her through a whole into the flat one floor below. The dog hit her head on the edge of a tile so hard that her eyes fell out of their sockets. Kejti suffered for a further twenty-four hours, before the owner put a plastic bag over her head and sealed it with masking tape. The dog stopped breathing a few minutes later. 

The prosecutor’s office charged the man with torturing the dog in a particularly cruel way and killing it in a particularly cruel way. He was given a suspended prison sentence of one year and ordered to pay money to a shelter in Świdnica; other measures included supervision by a court officer and a ban on owning animals for fifteen years. Judge Arkadiusz Rodziewicz wrote the following in the statement of reasons: “clearly, the defendant committed a brutal act that caused suffering to a dog, as after all its eyes fell out, there is no doubt as to guilt. This was particularly cruel. In light of this, why did the court hand down a suspended sentence? There is a trend, a fashion at the moment that animals evoke much more emotion than humans. Fortunately it is not society, but professional judges that hand down sentences”. 

Two years before that, the Szczecin district prosecutor’s office found that throwing a Yorkie against a balcony door and bed headboard did not qualify as animal cruelty. The argument was that the culprit did not do this repeatedly, he simply abused, one time, an animal of which he was the owner. In addition, throwing the dog was an act of spite towards another person who was in the residence. The case was closed. 

In 2016, also in Szczecin, the prosecutor’s office took action against a person who was cruel to pigeons for one year: this person kicked them, threw flares at them, and spread rat poison. Although there were many witnesses, the prosecutor’s office determined that this conduct was only intended to enforce compliance with a rule that it was prohibited to feed birds. For a conviction to take place for cruelty, an offence must be committed with the intent of harming an animal, known as “direct intent”, and intent is very difficult to prove. The case was closed. For this reason, since 2016, these two organisations have been appealing for the Animal Protection Act to be amended to include a category of offences committed without direct intent (potential intent), so that prosecutor’s offices are not able to close similar cases. “Acts of cruelty to animals must be performed in line with the standpoints in case law and views of legal scholars” – Dawid Karaś of EKOSTRAŻ wrote in the report.   

– In our previous report “How Poles are cruel to animals”, we raised the matter of abuse of wild animals, and we observed that in most cases, when the culprits were hunters, the cases were closed or a suspended sentence was handed down. In my view, this is because in Poland hunters are often part of the local establishment – Joanna Wydrych says, and Tomasz Argasiński adds – in our experience, as far as the law and the Polish justice system are concerned, all are equal, but some are more equal than others. This is not an optimistic statement, but perhaps it is not intended as such? 

I love pigs 

– I like animals considered to be ugly, dirty, disgusting, and smelly. Pigs, pigeons, rats. I wrote my master’s thesis in anthropology on the symbolism and objectification of pigs in contemporary culture. To me, it is a beautiful animal that in fact is very similar to humans. When I finished my master’s degree, I got my first tattoo – Olga Knapik rolls up her sleeve to reveal a tattoo of a piglet with the number 269. This was the ring number of a calf who fled an abattoir one time in Israel. People who campaign for animal rights often get that symbolic number tattooed or even branded on their body. 

Olga was one of the volunteers working on the “Do They Have Rights? We’re Checking!” project.
As her day job, she works at the Ethnographic Museum in Kraków, and runs the Mudita association, helping the families of people with disabilities. She is also studying nature preservation. – Acquaintances often ask: “Where do you find those injured pigeons? I have never seen one”. I answer that it is a question of the view we take of the world. That is why so often I spot for example a pigeon with a broken wing and take it to a care centre to be treated. An animal should be looked at in the same way as a person. Birds are non-human people – this term should be popularised, because our culture is founded on a relationship in which it is humans against the other species – Knapik says. – I call pigeons sensitive gurnards. They are highly intelligent animals that recognise human faces. It is extremely odd that in Kraków people see a dying pigeon and do not react – she adds 

But sometimes they do react. A lot has been said about the case of a courier who ran into a flock of pigeons at high speed on a bike on the Kraków Market Square, and killed two of them. The Kraków Municipal Police released security surveillance footage. The food courier was arrested the same day. 

On the other hand, two years ago, a driver of a tram in Kraków stopped the traffic to rescue an injured pigeon from the tram undercarriage. Later, a passenger wrote a letter to the Kraków Public Transport Authority, saying among other things: “Praise is due to a tram driver for the sense of civic duty and highly empathic and admirable conduct he displayed by saving an injured pigeon that sought refuge under his tram when fleeing from crows. He reported the incident, blocked the thoroughfare, and avoided running over the pigeon, without regard for the action his employer may take for blocking the traffic”. The passenger received the reply: “Thank you for the letter of praise, and please rest assured that there is no question of the employer taking any action. We are also very proud of the attitudes of our employees”.  

Tired activist 

Olga Knapik was among the volunteers from throughout Poland who attended, as public observers, court hearings concerning abuse of animals. – I pay attention to things such as whether the word used is “umarło” as used for people, or “zdechło”, for animals. I noted the reasons judges gave for judgments. I was pleasantly surprised a number of times when judges said for example that there is no place in mature society for abuse of those weaker than ourselves, and that an animal is a being with feelings. I recall the case of a man who sued his neighbour for throwing stones at his dog and tormenting it, and the judge found this to be animal cruelty, saying that causing fear and stress is precisely this. On the one hand, I was happy that the case had gone to court and a judgment had been handed down, but I could not help wondering how many cases like this never get to court, and whether a judge would be equally inclined to issue a ruling if the victim was a pig or chicken? – she says. 

The volunteers working on the project had regular online meetings with coordinators. The reasons for this included providing psychological support and addressing any problems that might arise. In addition, a special e-learning course was produced to prevent activists becoming burnt out, available on the e-learning portal operated by Fundacja Czarna Owca Pana Kota. – We should be under no illusion, activities of this kind are exhausting, because how long can you go on seeing pictures of harm done to animals, their pain, and death caused by human callousness and wickedness? Like people who work with human victims of abuse, with patients in hospices, and refugees, we also come into contact with suffering, and we are particularly prone to burnout   – Joanna Wydrych says. When the project ended, Tomasz Argasiński and I both decided to take a few months’ leave to recuperate after months of work centred around harm and death. 

Tinder for falcons 

1499 people made donations to the collection for the reward for information regarding the person killing falcons in Lublin.  

Angelika donated PLN 18 and posted the following comment: “Czarcik this is for you and for a peaceful future for your family”. 

With their (undivulged) donation, a person using the alias Vanish Hax wrote: “I don’t know how empty a person has to be to poison birds… I hope they find them and give them a punishment that leaves them reeling” 

M.V. made a donation of PLN 333, and stated the reasoning: “For the sake of principles, you son of a bitch!!!” 

Anonymous – PLN 49 – “For all falcons that have been poisoned and any other animals, you psychopathic degenerates”. 

In 2019, when two chicks were poisoned in Lublin (Poles were able to observe them in agony on their computers), there was also an investigation. There was a collection for a reward for a person with information. The culprit could not be found, and a year later the investigation was closed. This is thought to be the same person doing the killing, because Czart – like a number of other peregrine falcons in Lublin- died after eating the same poison. 

Wrotka waited for Czart for a week and then found a new partner, called Czajnik. He was born in 2022 in Grodzisk Mazowiecki, and his great-grandfather Franek fed, on his own, in the Warsaw district of Siekierki, a number of chicks placed with him from another falcon nest (we know all of this because of a ring). Czajnik also goes hunting to feed his adopted children. Internet users discussed how he knew that the female was available. Maybe it was “through Tinder for falcons”, maybe he “sent a message by carrier pigeon”, or maybe he simply “watched her through the camera the way we did”. 

To download the report go to: https://czarnaowca.org/wp-content/uploads/Bezkarni.-Przestepstwa-przeciwko-zwierzetom.-Raport-z-monitoringu.pdf

Project „Do They Have Rights? We’re Checking!” run by Mr Cat’s Black Sheep Foundation was conducted using funds from the Active Citizens Fund – National Programme funded by Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway using EEA Funds.

Text: Ewa Wołkanowska-Kołodziej

Photo: Anna Liminowicz

The report was published on Onet.pl