Russia Says Hunt Will Help Save Polar Bears
2007 China Post
http://www.rferl.org/content/article/1074112.html

VANKAREM, Russia -Here on the frozen edge of the country’s Arctic expanse, where a changing climate has brought polar bears into greater contact with people, Russia has embraced a counterintuitive method of trying to preserve the creatures: hunting them, legally.
For the first time since the Soviet Union banned the practice more than five decades ago, the government is pre- paring to allow hunters here to kill the bears. The animals are descending with greater regularity on coastal villages in this part of Russia ’s far north as a result of shrinking sea ice generally attributed to a warming planet.
“The normal life space for the polar bears is shrinking,” Anatoly A. Kochnev, a biologist with the Pacific Scientific Research and Fisheries Center here in the Chukotka region, said in an interview. “They come in search of food on the shore, and the main sources of food are where people live.”
Even as many warn that the world’s polar bears are threatened, scientists, environmentalists and native villagers here express hope that a legal hunt could decrease rampant poaching. If hunters are allowed to take at least some bears legally, the reasoning goes, they might be less tempted to break the law for the bear’s meat, consumed locally as an illicit delicacy, and for the thousands of dollars that pelts can fetch.
“It is like the Russian saying,” said Sergei Nomkymyn, - hunter in this village 130 kilometers north of the Arctic Circle, who favors a resumption of legal hunting that most here remember only from their elders’ tales. “The wolves would not be hungry, and the sheep would remain intact.”
Still, it remains to be seen whether the hunt can really reduce the poaching in a country with notorious corruption and lax enforcement of its own environmental rules.
The twin threats facing Russia’s polar bears - the recent warming of the Arctic climate and poaching - have put Vankarem and other villages along the coast of the country’s remote northeastern edge at the center of efforts to ensure the creatures’ survival.
Although the number of bears killed illegally here is unclear, the government estimates that as many as 100 are killed each year.
Mr. Kochnev said the number could be twice as high, an unsustainable blow to a regional population that roams from the northwestern coast of Alaska to the East Siberian Sea and has shrunk to as low as an estimated 2,000. (The world- wide population of polar bears is 20,000 to 25,000.)
The ban in Russia , which was imposed in 1956 after the population of bears experienced a sharp decline, will be lifted only partly to allow subsistence hunting by villagers in Chukotka, an impoverished, sparsely populated region across the Bering Strait from Alaska .
The hunt, officials here and in Moscow said, could resume as soon as this year or next, once a census is carried out and an annual quota that would not threaten the bears is set. In Alaska , the annual quota set by law has averaged roughly 40 a year.
Polar bears live mostly on sea ice, which they use as a platform for hunting seals, their main prey. With the floating Arctic ice cap shrinking in the summer to its smallest in possibly a century, the bears have had to swim longer distances to reach the seals, which stay closer to land.
One result has been more contacts with humans as the bears of the Chukchi Sea migrate along the region’s northern coast until the winter ice freezes again. Since 2003 there have been at least three fatal bear attacks in Chukotka.
In Vankarem, with 200 residents, most of them native Chukchi, the village has a patrol of hunters that monitors the bears’ arrival in autumn and tries to keep them out. One attraction for the bears has been an increase in the number of walruses lingering onshore. A habitat for walruses is situated on a rocky spit at the edge of the village. Where once a few thousand walruses gathered in the summer and fall, there are now tens of thousands, an increase that scientists also attribute to the reduction of the sea ice where walruses typically gather.
“In the autumn, there were as many polar bears as dogs,” Fyodor Tymityagin, a hunter here who is part of the patrol, said.
Stanislav E.Belikovof the All-Russian Research Institute for Nature Protection in Moscow , who has written many of the rules for the resumption of the hunt, said the threat of climate change and poaching made urgent measures necessary.
“In 50 years,” he said at a town meeting in April, “we may only be able to tell our grandchildren that these creatures existed here.”
My review: 本文焦點擺在「人熊之間」,說明人類制訂的環境政策怎樣改變動物的生存空間。許多文章指出,氣溫若持續上升,消融的海冰(shrinking sea ice)化為海水,在北極圈(the Arctic Circle)附近活動的北極熊沒有立足之地,數量會快速減少(population dwindles rapidly),甚至有絕種(extinction)之虞。
當然還有盜獵者的威脅,Polar Bear 的肉與毛皮(pelt)都有經濟價值. 從此篇報導了解俄羅斯政府針對這個現象,有個違反直覺(counterintuitive)「以獵止獵」的對策。他們希望以恢復合法捕獵(resume legal hunting)的方式,減少猖獗的偷獵情況(decrease rampant poaching),確保大多數北極熊能生存。現在情況是,政府打算部分解除禁令(partly lift / remove / withdraw the ban),開放部分沿海村鎮(coastal village) 的獵人按每年的獵捕限額(annual quota)捕殺北極熊。不過,由於俄羅斯政府的貪腐問題(corruption),加上環保法規執行不力(lax enforcement of environmental rules),這套措施能否奏效還真得待觀察。衷心希望這個漂亮的生物不會像恐龍樣的絕跡才好.
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