Why do they want to exterminate Russia’s bears?

Starting from March 21, 2025, in many regions of Russia (practically everywhere), the bear hunting season will begin. The master of the Russian Taiga will be killed for the sake of sports entertainment hunting! The “Safari” will end on June 10, after which, from August 1 until December 31, more mass killings will take place across the country.

Thanks to officials from the Ministry of Natural Resources, the hunting period has been extended until the end of December, at a time when bears are already asleep in their dens. Many of them are with cubs, or the female bears are pregnant and will be giving birth right in the middle of winter!

Hunters wake them with burning torches, “smoking” the bears out of their dens. First, the mother bear rushes outside to protect her cub! She is met by a “firing squad” of hunters, and then frightened cubs are pulled out of the den. If the cub has grown a bit (one-year-old) — the law allows it to be killed, and if it is newborn — it is either shot “quietly” or left to die on the bloody snow. In the cold.

In 2024, the Ministry of Natural Resources faced nature conservationists in the Supreme Court, who demanded the repeal of this horrific decree. But the officials referred to “global warming,” claiming bears started going into hibernation later. The judge sided with them!

Nor did arguments help that our country encompasses a huge variety of climate zones and that regions already have the right to set bear hunting dates on their own, depending on local conditions. Why make any changes at the federal level at all? Bears have always gone into hibernation differently from place to place. That has always been the case.

Unfortunately, officials from the Ministry of Natural Resources went even further and in 2024 tried to pass a draft law legalizing the killing of bears all winter long, right up to spring. Probably because of warming too? Apparently bears no longer hibernate at all?

Such are the bureaucratic paradoxes in our country.

Through the efforts of society — comrades remember the work we did, among other things — we managed to stall this insane draft law. Under public pressure, the Ministry of Natural Resources publicly abandoned further consideration of the bill! But the amendments allowing the killing of bears until the end of December remain in effect.

And I, having studied the problems of the Russian Taiga for years, exploring the wilderness from one end of the country to the other, understand perfectly well why this is being done: the paid hunting industry is growing, and the regions have set a course toward developing sports entertainment hunting. “Tourists” come from all over the world to shoot animals, bringing huge sums of money with them.

It is in their interests that this entire program to legalize even more bear killings is being carried out by officials from the Ministry of Natural Resources.

The troubles for the master of the Russian Taiga do not end there. 

For several years in a row, the number of predators coming near people has been growing. Wolves, bears, and tigers show up! As for tigers, this year the Ministry of Natural Resources openly stated that they are not hungry, that there is enough food, and there are no problems. Meanwhile, tigers are being recorded in large numbers, attacking domestic dogs (chained in villages); there are casualties among both tigers and people. And yet, they are listed in the Red Book, with no more than 750 individuals in the entire country.

The condition of the tigers themselves is alarming: they are thin and wounded. Some were simply hit by cars, they were so weakened! Moreover, many tigers had old, festering wounds; they had been shot. There were even starving tiger cubs without their mothers.

We have been demanding solutions and proposed a real plan to resolve conflicts with tigers! But so far, all we have managed to achieve is the federal government acknowledging that tigers are indeed starving, there is no food supply, and the taiga is being mercilessly cut down. However, despite the federal authorities acknowledging these problems, the Ministry of Natural Resources continues to send “official replies” claiming there are actually no problems.

And yet another bureaucratic paradox, because the Ministry of Natural Resources is part of the same federal government. So there is chaos within the system and nobody understands what is happening! Some unanimously confirm the problems, others insist that everything is fine and that attention should not be paid to it.

Furthermore, at the tiger protection meeting in Moscow, the leadership of the Ministry of Natural Resources refused to come at all. They sent two low-level officials, who apologetically stated, “we do not have any vertical structure.”

So what are we even talking about, comrades, if their entire power vertical “does not exist”? 

I specifically singled out the story about tigers. The thing is, while we tried to protect tigers and urged the government to start federal programs to change the methods of their protection, across the country there were conflicts with bears and wolves as well. 

And if tigers cannot be killed, since they are in the Red Book of the Russian Federation, wolves and bears certainly can be, by law! 

And to justify increasing the quotas for their killing, the media stirred up “hype,” claiming these animals come to people not because there is no food, but because there are supposedly too many of them in the wild. Especially many such reports appeared in the fall of 2024.

In fact, this also looks extremely paradoxical! That is, tigers come because they are starving (as confirmed by the federal government) and because the forests are being destroyed, but wolves and bears come because of “overpopulation”? So they supposedly don’t fit in the taiga anymore?

In reality, at that very moment, commercial hunters harvesting bears for derivatives (extracting fat, gallbladders, cutting off paws for traditional Chinese medicine) in the Far East and Siberia said that bears have almost half as much fat as they should! They complain that they do not have enough derivatives to ship to China in the form of dietary supplements.

It turns out that the problem with tigers is not being solved. But you can’t kill them since they are in the Red Book of the Russian Federation! Although many officials openly demand to legalize their shooting, and even now the Ministry of Natural Resources of the Russian Federation is trying to push through a draft law allowing the “harvesting” of Red Book animals.

It is much simpler with wolves — they are simply killed en masse, without limits, and bounties are even paid from the budget for each exterminated “sanitary”! Essentially eradicating the true Russian wolf as a species. Nobody even bothers to protect them or to consider scientific research on the importance of wolves in ecosystems, or the fact that people themselves cause these conflicts — by breaking up wolf packs, the survivors are forced to move closer to human settlements.

And the same is true for bears: they are just killed even more. They’re not tigers, after all! And “den hunting” these days, with the growing demand for “Russian safari” from foreign trophy hunters in our country, is in high favor.

For the 2024–2025 hunting season, regional authorities signed decrees increasing the quota for killing bears. For the first time in history, more than 42,000 quotas were issued, meaning officials officially allowed that many bears to be killed!

Each year we do extensive work — we gather all the official decrees of the regional authorities, study them, consolidate the information. 

You can download our registry with calculations for specific regions, as well as learn how the Prosecutor General’s Office of the Russian Federation and the FSB of Russia personally stood up to protect bears, but even they failed. The security agencies really tried to defend the bears’ right to Life.

They cited specific numbers showing how many bears we had before the massive promotion of the paid hunting industry in the country began, when the Russian Taiga started being physically turned into a shooting range for destroying animals.

Registry of Bear Extermination

In my opinion, we see blatant lies from the officials, an endless race for quick profit, purely selfish interests. Everyone is profiting off our long-suffering Russian Taiga in whatever way they can! Some sell bear parts for Chinese “bear medicine,” while others sign papers to increase the mass killings.

Somehow, we must also save our Russian wolf, and our bears, and our tigers. And generally protect all forests, before the last of them is destroyed. And to be honest — there are now so many problems, with the last biological chains in the wilderness collapsing so critically, that I see no other solutions except urgent FORCED conversion of the remaining natural areas into Territories of Complete Ecological Tranquility (TCET).

We are currently striving for exactly that! We are proposing a large-scale project to the government to create TCET zones in our country, which will make it possible to prevent species extinction and preserve what little we still have safe and sound.

We are talking about a complete overhaul of the nature reserve system in Russia.

But how can we break through the bureaucratic red tape? How can we pull away from the “feeding trough” those who only make money off our Russian Taiga? Time after time, causing it incredible pain.

Even the master of Russia’s forests, the bear, is in danger. During the year, more than 42,000 permits for its shooting have officially been issued! And the killings will begin as early as March 21.

We are trying to influence these problems; please take part in our public initiatives: 

• Against the Ministry of Natural Resources decree on killing bears until December 31
• For changing methods of tiger protection in the country and creating a Unified Digital Platform
• Against the extermination of wolves in Russia and launching a Federal program for their protection 

© PAVEL PASHKOV