“They cut off the paws and leave the bodies to rot in the taiga”: bears are being slaughtered for exporting paws to China.

In 2025, we carried out major work and reviewed all regional decrees across Russia on issuing quotas for the shooting of bears. For the first time in history, the figures are simply impossible to believe — orders have been signed to shoot more than 44,000 bears nationwide! The increase is seen every year, and time after time they “set records” for the scale of bear killings, as if they have decided to purge all of nature of the master of the Russian Taiga. At the same time, as you know, the Ministry of Natural Resources extended the bear-hunting season each year all the way to 31 December, effectively legalizing the shooting of bears while they are in hibernation (they usually den in late November), and it also directly tried to pass a bill to allow the killing of bears throughout the entire winter until spring!

I have already spoken about the expansion of the industry of paid killings—sporting, entertainment hunting. Today I want to talk about how bears are being exterminated for the export of paws to China and other Asian countries. Alongside fully official killings, groups of poachers operate in the taiga: they kill bears en masse, cut off their paws, and leave the bodies to rot in the forest! After that, the paws are smuggled in batches to the Celestial Empire, where they are sold for huge sums of money.

Detecting smuggling is very difficult, but even based on the studies that confirm the interception and confiscation of bear paws at the border, the numbers are catastrophic! For example, according to CITES experts, in the period from 2015 to 2019 alone (over four years) in the Far East, paws from at least 1,186 bears were confiscated. In 92% of cases, the cargo was being transported specifically to China. And these are only the cases that were detected and documented. 

At the same time, bears are allowed to be killed entirely legally and, as I wrote above, the scale of shootings is growing. Therefore, derivatives are exported legally as well, mainly in the form of various dietary supplements, in order to bypass restrictions. In this way, the boundary between a “legal hunting product” and poaching becomes blurred. In essence, bears can be killed officially on an almost industrial scale; all that remains is to find a shadow method to export it all to Asian countries. 

Also for context: officially, a license to kill a bear costs 3,000 rubles plus a 650-ruble state fee. This excludes the Asiatic black bear and the Kamchatka population—those cost 6,000 rubles. That’s it: that is how the life of the master of the Russian Taiga is valued.

In reality, true horror reigns in the wild, and few people understand it! In those very years for which the interception of illegal exports of bear paws to China was counted (2015–2019), the FSB and the Prosecutor General’s Office of the Russian Federation officially spoke out in defense of bears, warning that nature would soon be bluntly cleared of the clubfooted ones and that urgent measures were needed to protect them! The scandal was hushed up, and the killings only increased.

Apparently, where there is demand, they try to provide “supply.” And demand from China is colossal! The drivers of demand are dual: on the one hand, gastronomic prestige—when bear paw is sold in restaurants for fabulous sums under the brand of a “Manchurian delicacy”—and on the other, the use of paws in traditional medicine.

Unfortunately, there is no unified customs statistics for the export specifically of paws or bear bile. Especially since more and more bears are being killed quite officially, and the whole sphere is extremely “blurred.” It is impossible to understand where it is legal and where it is criminal! And how can a purge of nature of bears be legal at all? Personally, I cannot wrap my head around it, especially in the context, for example, of winter shootings of bears прямо in their dens—at a moment when many she-bears are pregnant and will give birth in the middle of winter. 

Most seizures—namely the illegal export “corridors” for bear paws—fall on three regions: Amur Oblast (38%), Primorsky Krai (24%), and Zabaykalsky Krai (16%). At the same time, according to the same CITES scientists, out of 372 cases of interception of derivative exports, 93% were parts of brown bear bodies, exported to China, Hong Kong, and other regions. That is, the main leading demand from China is specifically for the delivery from Russia of parts of bear bodies.

I tried to find some consolidated data in studies; unfortunately, all experts agree that in practice it is impossible to understand where the “white” part of exports is and where it is poaching. Shipments are deliberately mixed, origins are substituted, and “similar documents and routes” are created.

In my view, what “legal” or “illegal” is there, if all of this is the insane extermination of the bears of the Russian Taiga for Chinese schizophrenics dreaming of “eternal life” and the “right to a delicacy” in a restaurant—sucking the fingers of an unfortunate tortured animal whose body was left lying and rotting deep in the forests of Russia. One enormous crime against wildlife!

So that you understand what sums we are talking about, the situation is as follows. In January 2018, a major special operation was carried out near Lake Khanka, where law enforcement detained and seized smuggled goods: 867 bear paws, as well as claws and bear gall bladders. The paws alone were valued at a minimum of 55 million rubles! Experts said that “on the other side of the border” each limb sells for at least a thousand dollars. In other words, one large shipment worth roughly one million dollars in total.

I studied fresh data on the Chinese market; demand, of course, is growing at a frantic pace. Especially against the backdrop of mass illnesses, people have begun to sincerely believe that if you kill a bear and eat its paws, you can get rid of cancer or severe chronic disease. For this they are ready to buy derivatives, feeding demand and financing the mass extermination of bears.

Is that not why the authorities officially began to massively increase quotas for bear shootings and tried to allow killings even throughout the winter, while the animals sleep peacefully in their dens?

I remember when we carried out expeditions to defend Russia’s forests across Siberian and Far Eastern regions, I spoke with local foresters. All of them say the same thing: they regularly find bear carcasses from which only the paws have been cut off and the gall bladder removed! They say poachers quickly enter the forest, use thermal imagers to find bears, shoot them, cut off the paws, pack them into vacuum bags, and then just as quickly leave the taiga. Catching them is practically impossible!

That is, the whole “operation” is high-margin and compact; everything that is “ballast” is discarded at the kill site. They take out only the valuable paws and bile! Literally, if each bear paw is sold in China for a thousand dollars, then from one animal you can get around four thousand dollars at the final point of sale. A poacher will get at least 1,000–1,500 dollars per killed animal.

I will once again refer to our data on bear culling quotas to emphasize just how critically the number of killings has increased. If for the 2019/2020 hunting season the authorities issued permits to shoot 24,405 individuals, then by 2026 it is permitted to destroy 44,682 bears.

That is the tragedy, allies! The extermination of the master of the Russian Taiga continues; prices are rising, and demand is enormous as well.

We are planning already in February–March 2026 to launch a separate project to protect bears, in which our register will be presented with data by specific regions on the number of quotas issued. Let’s think about how to fight this madness and what we can do to defend the bear’s right to Life.

© PAVEL PASHKOV