By ANDREW E. KRAMER
Published: January 8, 2013
MOSCOW — Wolf packs are prowling at the edges of villages in the remote
Sakha-Yakutia region of Siberia, eating livestock that includes horses
and domesticated reindeer.
They are slinking near towns like Verkhoyansk, far above the Arctic
Circle, where the mayor told a regional newspaper that he had organized a
hunting party to kill as many as possible. “Our hunters killed more than half the pack,” said the mayor, Mikhail
Osipov, but that only bought time. “Those that survived are again
threatening the horses,” he said, adding that the remaining wolves would
also be shot at the first opportunity.
In fact, the wolves have grown so thick in Yakutia that the governor,
Yegor Borisov, recently declared a state of emergency, which wildlife
experts said was largely symbolic and intended to draw attention to the
problem.
Far from worrying about wolf conservation — as is the case, though
controversially, in parts of the western United States — the thinly
populated region of Yakutia, like much of the rest of rural Russia,
grapples with a perennial problem of excessive predation by wolves.
In announcing the state of emergency, the regional government said
wolves killed about 16,000 domesticated reindeer last year and 313
horses. The wolf population was about 3,500, the government said, while
ideally it should not exceed 500.
Experts say the wolf problem is not so much a matter of overpopulation
as a cyclical collapse in the wolves’ primary prey, rabbits. In the
remotest areas, the rabbit cycle is typically trailed by a decline in
the numbers of wolves as they starve and freeze to death. But in
populated areas, packs switch to livestock.
In Russia, a country with many enthusiastic hunters and lots of open
space, only the most charismatic of predators — Amur snow tigers, for
example — are accorded much protection. Because the wolves are not
endangered and would most likely die anyway if not for the meals of
livestock, conservationists generally do not object to the hunting.
Hunters cull wolves and bears by the hundreds. Sarah Palin would feel
right at home with Russian wolf hunters, who generally hunt on
snowmobiles, which can outpace the animals in thick winter snow. (As
governor of Alaska, Ms. Palin encouraged aerial hunts, which were also preferred by the Soviet government.) Traps are sometimes used, though poisoning was outlawed in 2005.
Hunting is typically done for a pelt bounty, which in Yakutia this
winter is $660 per adult wolf pelt and $50 for the skin of a cub.
Some municipalities provide additional incentives. The city of
Verkhoyansk, for example, kicks in an extra $300 for a wolf pelt, and
one town has promised a snowmobile to the hunter who stacks up the most
pelts, Rossiskaya Gazeta, the Russian state newspaper, reported.
The system of bounties that remained after the end of Soviet-era aerial
hunts has proved cheaper on a per head basis, though less effective in
reducing overall wolf numbers, according to a summary of a debate in the
Yakutia regional legislature published on its Web site. So, every year,
more money is set aside for bounties: $560,000 in 2012, compared with
$270,000 in 2003.
To encourage hunting, the regional government has also designated a
holiday for hunters, on the second Saturday in April.
Despite these efforts, wolves will maintain their primacy in the frosty
northern realms, experts say, and are expected to continue to stalk
small towns in Siberia.
And the hunters are expected to continue to get a pass from the
country’s conservationists. “There are too many wolves in Russia,” said
Vladimir G. Krever, the director of the program in biodiversity in
Russia with the World Wildlife Fund.
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