While everyone was distracted by Covid-19, in a matter of days Russia has quietly passed amendments to laws that effectively legalise trophy hunting of endangered species for “research and education” or in “exceptional cases”.

The amendments, which came into effect on Sunday (August 1), state that hunting one of Russia’s 13 endangered animals is permissible in order to monitor, regulate reproduction rates, and prevent mass diseases, or “for the purpose of acclimatization, resettlement and hybridization of hunting resources,” reported the Moscow Times yesterday.

This would apply to all animals currently listed in Russia’s ‘Red Book’ of rare and endangered animals “on the verge of extinction” according to Greenpeace, including the Amur tiger, Central Asian and Far Eastern leopard, snow leopard, bison, saiga, Przewalski's horse, Altai mountain sheep, gazelle, polar bear, Siberian crane, bowhead whale and gray whale.

While the wording of the amendment would seem to restrict hunting to scientific endeavours only rather than for sport or profit, a similar loophole allowed Japanese fleets to continue whaling for profit despite commercial hunting ending in 1986 and resuming only when Japan withdrew from the International Whaling Commission (IWC) in 2019.

According to Greenpeace, trophy hunting in Russia is popular among the country’s wealthy who are thought to have exerted influence on the State Duma (lower house) via the powerful and seemingly well-connected hunting lobby.

“If shooting used to be expressly prohibited in the old hunting law, now there is no such thing,” Mikhail Kreindlin, the head of Greenpeace Russia’s program for specially protected areas, told radio station Govorit Moskva (Moscow Speaking). “We believe that the hunting lobby in the Duma asked for these amendments in order to be able to hunt Red Book animals under the guise of hunting for scientific purposes.”

Kreindlin added that Russia’s elite could just “pay scientists” to justify their trophy hunting in the name of research and education. That hunting elite allegedly includes Vladislav Reznik, one of the State Duma deputies who authorised the amendments, and who according to Kommersant business daily is a member of so-called “Mountain Hunters’ Club”.

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It isn’t the first time the Mountain Hunters’ Club - headed by a former FSB special forces officer - has tried to go after Red Book animals, having previously requested permits to hunt the rare Putorana snow sheep.

A petition launched by activists opposing the amendments - with wording drawn up jointly by scientists from the Russian Academy of Sciences and Greenpeace - has garnered more nearly 190,000 signatures, with organisers accusing Reznik of being unable to “come to terms with the fact that some laws impede his ideas and desires”.

More troubling still, according to the petition’s organisers, the amendments in fact make it harder for scientists to add new species to the Red Book. Instead, hunting restrictions will depend on data from “state monitoring” - which they say is not available to the public - and take into account “natural fluctuations in numbers” yet without clearly defining the parameters for constitutes a natural variation thus making it ambiguous and open to interpretation.

“From a biological point of view, the text of the law is so illiterate that it is obvious that its purpose was simply to make it impossible to enter new [animals] into the regional or federal Red Books,” said the petition’s lead author Arseny Filippov.

However, Vladimir Krever, the scientific director of WWF Russia's biodiversity conservation program, disagreed telling Kommersant that fundamentally nothing had changed.

“The issuance or non-issuance of permits will depend not on scientists, but on [state environmental watchdog] Rosprirodnadzor,” said Krever. “Although, of course, the old wording, when the hunting of Red Book species is absolutely prohibited, is better.”

Andrew Gough is Media and Investigations Manager for Surge.

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