ENVIRONMENT: Illegal Tiger Hunting Continues in Russian Far East

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Andrei Ivanov and Judith Perera

MOSCOW/LONDON, Jul 1 1996 (IPS) - Endangered big cats are being killed by poachers in Russia’s Far East despite the best efforts of conservationists.

On 28 June poachers shot and killed two Siberian Ussuri tigers, thought to now number no more than 200. According to the Tiger Conservation Group a tigress and her one-year-old cub were killed in the Hasan District of the Primorye Region.

This was the second such incident within a week. A few days before a female leopard was shot point-blank right in her cage in the Tigrovaya Pad natural preserve shortly before she was to be sent to the Moscow Zoo.

Leopards are even more rare in the region and are believed to number only 20. In this case the poacher was arrested and ordered to pay a 40 million rouble (7,820 dollar) fine.

However, the fine will mean nothing to the international gangs which are believed to be behind the killings. “In my opinion, local poachers are being encouraged in every way by international criminal groups,” says Dmitry Pikunov, a leading expert in the study of Ussuri tigers.

“Members of the Tiger conservation group have on several occasions discovered attempts by Chinese and Korean dealers to contact local poachers, ” he explains.

“Furs, bones, whiskers and other parts of the animals, which can be used for medicinal purposes, are secretly smuggled abroad both by land and sea. One in 20 ships is thought to carry such contraband.”

He says the conservationists cannot fight the poachers alone. “All the efforts, taken here in the Primorye Region to save rare species of animals, will be futile, until law enforcement agencies in the countries, to which the contraband is delivered, help us with this work.”

A census of tigers is under way in the region financed by the United States as part of a Russian-American project on Creation of a System of Rational Nature Utilisation in the Russian Far East within the framework of the Chernomyrdin-Gore agreement on environmental cooperation.

The work is being coordinated by the game wardens and hunters in Khabarovsk and Maritime Territories with the aim of providing precise information about the tiger population which is believed to have fallen dramatically in recent years.

The exact number of tigers in the taiga is unknown but there are thought to be no more than 56-60 in Khabarovsk Territory. In Primorye they have some protection in the Ussuri nature reserve, but policing is no longer adequate to deter the increasingly well organised poachers.

In the past conservation measures by the Soviet authorities were very successful. The tiger was declared an endangered species after World War II and the nature reserve was established.

What were at the time the stiff fine of 3,000 roubles was introduced for anyone caught hunting tigers. The population had dwindled to 30 before the war as a result of uncontrolled hunting and rapid industrialisation but the conservation policies over the next 50 years brought their number up to over 400 again.

On the Chinese side of the border where no conservation measures were taken the tiger population continued to fall and is now less than 30.

The problem facing the Ussuri several years ago was not that the territory set aside for the reserve was inadequate but that the number of animals on which the tigers feed was falling.

Experts estimate that 430 tigers need a population of over 300,000 other animals as prey but there was only a fifth of that number left in the region. Hunting of deer, elk, wild boar and other animals was only banned in 1985. Forest fires and logging have also contributed to the problem by reducing the natural habitat of these animals.

There were estimated to be then only enough to support 250 tigers and different ways of reducing the population were being considered.

One enterprising solution suggested was to allow closely supervised groups of U.S. tourists to “hunt” tigers for sale to zoos. This had the full support of the U.S. Safari Club International which sent over a group in 1989 to investigate the possibilities. A number of foreign tourist companies also expressed an interest in developing safari type holiday packages to the area.

However everything changed again in the wake of the collapse of the USSR and loss of central control. Poaching of tigers has now become big business.

In the past tigers were hunted primarily to protect livestock but today they are being hunted for profit. Over the past four hunting seasons (winter) it is estimated over 100 tigers have been killed in Primorye Kray and over 60 in Khabarovsk.

According to an investigation last year by the London-based NGO Traffic International, the main export markets for tiger bone are China and South Korea. A shipment of 500 kilogrammes of tiger bones was seized in Harbin in China in 1993, an amount estimated to represent the remains of 20 or more tigers.

Tiger skins, on the other hand, mostly go to Japan where they are traded for second-hand cars.