With the opening of the Sochi Olympics this week (events begin on Thursday, and the opening ceremony is set for Friday), people all over the world should be enjoying the approaching spectacle, known for it’s ability to unite, and display the best traits of humanity. Yet for the dogs of Sochi, Russia, it appears that the onset of the international spectacle is bad news. The Sochi City Hall recently hired a company (Basya Services) to kill off stray dogs in the Olympic host city.

Wait what? WHAT? No, it’s sadly true.

“Let’s call things by their real name,” said Alexei Sorokin, head of Basya Services, and Russia’s answer to Cruella de Vil in a recent interview with Business Insider. “These dogs are biological trash.”

Biological trash? That’s the phrase you’re going with? Does he even know what “public relations” means?

Oh, and it got worse. Sorokin tried to rationalize the harsh policy.

“A dog ran into the Fisht Stadium, we took it away,” Sorokin said to an AP reporter. “God forbid something like this happens at the actual opening ceremony. This will be a disgrace for the whole country.”

So, killing all the dogs is necessary to avoid embarrassment? That seems astronomically over the top by itself, but that’s not even the problem here. It’s more to this point: PEOPLE LOVE DOGS. Maybe not all people, but most people. Case in point, this was one of the most popular Super Bowl commercials:

And there wasn’t even beer in the whole commercial. Didn’t matter for Budweiser, they crushed it. Why? BECAUSE PEOPLE LOVE DOGS. The disgrace isn’t in a random dog wandering into a stadium, it’s probably in the systematic extermination of an entire population of dogs.

So, aside from the moral bankruptcy involved with killing a large number of dogs simply because a city wants to vainly look appealing during two weeks of international media attention, it’s also not even intelligent business.

Look at the pup in the picture above. Is that little guy really the problem for the coming Olympics? Ease up, Alexei.

Images via Quinn Rooney/Getty Images & Mike Ehrmann/Getty Images