The Ministry of Natural Resources intends to allow the killing of rare animals to “prevent their suffering”

The Ministry of Natural Resources has published a draft amendment to the rules for killing red book animals. The reason for their shooting may be the intention to “save the individual from suffering”, and the process itself is proposed to be renamed from “extraction” to “extraction”. The expert community points out that these are two completely different terms, and the new one is more dangerous for animals, and the initiative as a whole can “free the hands of corrupt officials and hunters.”

The Ministry of Natural Resources and Ecology intends to update the legislative norms allowing, under certain conditions, to kill animals listed in the Red Book (with the exception of aquatic biological resources). Now this issue is regulated by a resolution adopted back in 1997. It says about the “rules for obtaining” rare animals, but now the Ministry of Natural Resources proposes “rules for obtaining”. As in the current legislation, the authors of the amendments provide for the killing of Red Book individuals only in “exceptional cases”, that is, for the sake of preserving wildlife; monitoring the state of the population; public health protection; eliminate the threat to human life; protection against mass diseases of domestic animals; as well as ensuring the traditional way of life of indigenous peoples. It is proposed to supplement the list of exceptional cases by preventing the suffering of sick or injured individuals.

The ministry told Kommersant that it was updating the rules “on behalf of the Government of the Russian Federation No. 1104-P36-DG dated April 24, 2023”: this document requires reissuing acts that entered into force before January 1, 2020, and amending the acts that entered into effective after January 1, 2020. The department insists that the project “does not fundamentally differ from the current rules.” “As before, the extraction of Red Book objects is allowed only in exceptional cases, upon receipt of the appropriate permission from Rosprirodnadzor, where a special commission has been created that considers each application individually,” the press service of the ministry said. The Ministry of Natural Resources clarifies that “the timing and methods of removal” of animals “should not cause damage to populations and habitats”, and “tools and methods of extraction should reduce the likelihood of causing physical and mental injury to animals.”

However, the wording of the updated rules raises questions among the environmental community, including terminological ones. “It’s not very clear to me why the removal from nature began to be called prey,” a senior researcher at the Institute for Ecology and Evolution Problems of the Russian Academy of Sciences, told Kommersant. A. N. Severtsova Sophia Rosenfeld. “Production is always an opportunity to kill.” She believes that “the old system with a strict ban on the hunting of Red Book animals has worked great since the days of the USSR,” and the updated rules can “fix the corruption schemes that hunters can use for their entertainment.” The honored ecologist of Russia Vsevolod Stepanitsky points out that the concept of “prey” implies both animal slaughtering and their shooting or trapping with subsequent killing. In his opinion, officials should reconsider the rationale for “monitoring” rare animals: “Today, there are many ways to study the population without harming its individual individuals. It would have been written clearly: shooting for monitoring is not allowed, only temporary capture for tagging and subsequent release into the wild is possible.” Mikhail Kreindlin, a member of the expert council on the reserve business, believes that hunters can theoretically try to “use the monitoring process for their own purposes, as they have already tried to do.” Recall that in 2018 the Ministry of Natural Resources already received proposals to introduce “special programs” in Russia that allow trophy hunting for Red Book species of animals, so that hunters will continue to finance the protection of these species. The corresponding letter was sent to the department by State Duma deputy Vladislav Reznik, who is a member of the Mountain Hunters Club. Then the initiative was not supported by the government.

“Corrupt” Mr. Kreindlin calls the new wording on the production of animals to “prevent the suffering of sick or injured objects of the animal world”: “How will all these commissions understand that the animal is suffering? Will they ask him personally? The main problem is that there is no way to prove after the fact whether there was suffering.”

Lawyer Maksim Krupsky conducted an independent anti-corruption expertise of the project (available to Kommersant) and came to the conclusion that paragraph 2 (specifies cases in which the extraction of rare specimens is possible) “contradicts the current legislation and contains corruption factors.” Among them, the lawyer pointed to the absence or uncertainty of the terms, conditions or grounds for making decisions; the presence of duplicating powers of state bodies; contradictions between the norms and the possibility of their arbitrary choice, as well as the use of unsettled, ambiguous terms and categories of an evaluative nature. According to Mr. Krupsky, “the above provision of the draft rules can lead to death, reduction in the number of wildlife objects listed in the Red Book of the Russian Federation, which is contrary to the federal law “On the Animal World””.

The draft resolution is at the stage of public discussion until the end of July.

Polina Yachmennikova