The government adopted an order destroying Baikal

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

The scandalous project to significantly reduce the boundaries of the water protection zone of Lake Baikal was approved on March 26, 2018, despite the protests of scientists, the environmental prosecutor's office and some deputies of the State Duma of the Russian Federation. While the country was grieving along with Kemerovo, Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev adopted amendments to the order of the Russian government regulating the exclusion of the territories of settlements from the boundaries of the water protection zone of Lake Baikal.

And on March 30, the Ministry of Agriculture of the Russian Federation published planned amendments to the fishing rules for the Baikal fishery basin, allowing the killing of seals. There is an opinion that, as in the case of the discharge of Lake Baikal, officials took advantage of the distraction of public attention and adopted documents in the interests of individuals.

Primal murder

So, the Ministry of Agriculture of the Russian Federation has prepared a document that lifts the ban on the extraction of the Baikal seal. In the new version of the document, only lactating females and pups at the pups stage are protected. And although the amendments are restrictive (in terms of the timing and areas of production), the very attempt to legalize the murder shocked environmentalists and the public. For example, the Irkutsk scientist, Candidate of Biological Sciences Yevgeny Baranov, who has been studying the Baikal seal for more than 35 years, tirelessly repeats the fact that it is primitive to allow shooting without taking into account the population.

According to him, the published value of the number of Baikal seals in recent years is about 130 thousand individuals.

“Since in the 90s of the last century, the counts of seals gave a value of about 100 thousand, the data of recent years are interpreted as an increase in the population and serve as an argument in favor of resuming the harvesting of seals. However, if we take into account the error in determining the number of seals - more than 30%, then it is impossible to say that the population has grown, because 130 differs from 100 by just these 30 percent. We can only say that the used accounting method does not allow judging the increase in the number of seals on Lake Baikal, since it has a significant error,”the scientist assured.

Recall that the Baikal seal has not yet been included in the main (legal) section of the Red Book and is indicated only in the "list … of animals that need special attention to their condition in the natural environment", but its fishing has been prohibited since 1980, since the population of seals decreased greatly due to poaching. Now an exception has been made only for scientists and representatives of the indigenous peoples of the North (mainly the Evenks). But after local "experts" began to declare that the population of seals had grown excessively, and hunting for it and delicacies from seal meat could attract tourists to Lake Baikal in winter, "figures" appeared among local businessmen who opposed the ban on hunting for Baikal seals.

The fact that they are seeking permission for mass fishing for their own selfish purposes has become evident in the emergence of sites offering tourists "Baikal Safari" for a lot of money. Moreover, one of the proposals worth 150 thousand rubles per person (deleted at the request of the prosecutor's office) referred to 2019. Most likely, it is by that time that it is planned to lobby for a hunting permit.