Hunting in Russia

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The Hunters at Rest by Vasily Perov. 1871.

Hunting in Russia has an old tradition in terms of

indigenous people, while the original features of state and princely economy were farming and cattle-breeding. There was hunting for food as well as sport. The word "hunting" ("охота", okhota) first appeared in the common Russian language at the end of the 15th century.[1] Before that the word "catchings" ("ловы", lovy) existed to designate the hunting business in general.[1] The hunting grounds were called in turn lovishcha ("ловища").[1]
In the 15th-16th centuries, foreign ambassadors were frequently invited to hunts; they also received some of the prey afterwards.

The right of using the hunting grounds in Russia was once granted to every social class. The right of the nobility was even sometimes limited by agreements with others regarding hunting grounds. The hawkers and separate persons who dealt with hounds, beavers, black grouses, hares, etc. were permitted either on the landed properties, or on territories specified by local people. Though the Russian Orthodox clergy once disapproved the hunting, these persons were authorized to eat and feed their horses, hounds and falcons on others' account or even demand participation in hunting.[2]

The Russian imperial hunts evolved from hunting traditions of early Russian rulers (

Grand Princes and Tsars
), under the influence of hunting customs of European royal courts.

During the soviet rule, state-sponsored hunting clubs were formed within the administrative boundaries or factories. Hunting clubs based in cities were allocated hunting grounds where club members were allowed to hunt according to the federal and local regulations. Following demise of the Soviet Union private individuals were allowed to lease hunting territories formerly used by government sponsored clubs. Many lease owners are wealthy Russians who are willing to spend large sums of money in order to maintain leased hunting grounds for their pleasure and sometimes to allow other hunters to use their territories for a fee. As a result, the quality and quantity of the game increased dramatically during the past 20 years in most parts of Russia.[citation needed] During the Soviet Union time, a single agency called "Glavohota" was granted an authority to conduct hunts for the foreign hunters. Nowadays many outfitters and booking agents organize hunting trips for the foreigners. The inevitable competition between such companies improved quality of hunts and brought down the prices which used to be extremely high.[citation needed]

Big game

Bear

Russia's northeast part, the

Siberian brown bear (Ursus arctos beringianus), Syrian brown bear (Ursus arctos syriacus), Ussuri brown bear
(Ursus arctos lasiotus), etc.

False Dmitriy I was especially keen on bear hunting.[4] A legend describes the miraculous salvation of Tsar Alexis of Russia from a bear by Saint Sava. After 1650/51 the bear hunts of Tsars became rare. In 2007 Russia proposed to allow polar bear hunting by the Chukchi people, for the first time since the Soviet Union banned hunting the dwindling species in 1956.[5]

Wolf

The wolf is the most widespread large indigenous

game animal in Russia.[6] The best hunting time is considered to be January–February.[6]

Carcasses of hunted wolves in Kamyshinsky District, Volgograd Oblast, Russia.

Wolves were hunted in both

Cossacks.[7] Covers were drawn by sending mounted men through a wood with a number of dogs of various breeds,[8] including deerhounds, staghounds and Siberian wolfhounds, as well as smaller greyhounds and foxhounds,[9] as they made more noise than borzoi.[8] A beater, holding up to six dogs by leash, would enter a wooded area where wolves would have been previously sighted.[9] Other hunters on horseback would select a place in the open where the wolf or wolves may break. Each hunter held one or two borzois, which would be slipped the moment the wolf takes flight.[8] Once the beater sighted a wolf, he would shout "Loup! Loup! Loup!" and slip the dogs. Thea idea was to trap the wolf between the pursuing dogs and the hunters on horseback outside the wood.[9] The borzois would pursue the wolf along with the horsemen and yapping curs. Once the wolf was caught by the borzois, the foremost rider would dismount and quickly dispatch the wolf with a knife. Occasionally, wolves are captured alive in order to better train borzoi pups.[8]

Before the

Serfs began hunting wolves after their emancipation in 1861, though rarely with success, as civilian firearms were highly expensive, and the cheaper ones were usually primitive and unable to bare the heavy ammunition necessary to kill wolves.[10]
After the
RSFSR in 1978, compared to 7,900 two years prior. With an increase in population, twice as many wolves were culled in the 1980s than in the prior decade. Wolves became extinct in Wrangel Island in the early 1980s.[12] In 1984, the RSFSR had over 2000 wolf hunting brigades consisting of 15,000 hunters who killed 16 400 wolves.[10] Overall, the Soviet Union culled over 1 500 000 wolves for a cost of 150,000,000 rubles on bounties alone. With the dissolution of the Soviet Union, many wolf bounties were lowered or dropped altogether.[10] Wolf hunting continues in Russia, at the expense of individual hunters rather than the government.[13]

Hunting with hounds

Elizaveta Petrovna go hunting, a 1900 painting by Valentin Serov
.

Under Grand Duke Vasili III, who personally loved the huntings for hare, there were over one hundred chasseurs who dealt particularly with wolves and foxes.[14] The court hunt of that time embraced the chasseurs with hounds (выжлятники), their head (доезжачий), borzoi hunters (борзятники), dog-breeders and beaters. Additionally there were cooks, grooms and drivers. Depending on the number of hounds there were big and small hunts. The first one involved forty hounds and twelve packs of three borzois each, and the second consisted of eighteen hounds and twenty borzois in five packs.[14]

As landlords, counts and dukes had kennels, there were stables and villages with serfs, who sowed oats which was to be mixed with meat as a hound forage. Each kennel could support up to 1,000 hounds.[15] The Emancipation reform of 1861 put an end to hunting with hounds. In 1917 there were only two hound chases in the fading Russian Empire: Gatchina and Pershino, in the Tula Governorate.[15]

Hunting birds

Noblewomen hunting. Taken in the 1890s.

Orthodox martyr

Saint Trifon is often depicted with a white merlin on his hand. Particularly the name of Moscow's Sokolniki Park refers to the rapid spread of falconry-related slobodas in Tsarist Russia. As indicated by English diplomat Jerome Horsey, Boris Godunov used to be a hawker. Meanwhile, the use of hunting birds was already popular among Russian nobility in the times of the Golden Horde.[16] There were several hundred such birds in possession of Ivan IV, and even the road tax was collected in pigeons for falcons.[16]

Walrus

The first mention of Russia-related

Saami people, who penetrated to this area in the early 12th century, could only hunt for small groups of walruses and came to the northern part of the White Sea from time to time.[17] The Russian walrus hunting in that region started in the early 16th century.[17] Purposeful and mass walrus hunting was stimulated by the exploration of the Arctic archipelagoes Novaya Zemlya and Spitsbergen with adjacent areas where the large walrus rookeries were concentrated. The collapse of Russian walrus hunting happened at the first half of the 19th century, being a result of interaction of both ecological and anthropological factors.[17]

See also

Notes

  1. ^ a b c Охота. Период Российского государства (in Russian). Retrieved 2007-06-09.
  2. ^ Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary
  3. ^ Карамзин, Н. М. История государства Российского, т. VIII
  4. ^ Карамзин, Н. М. История государства Российского, т. XI; Буссов, К. Московская хроника. 1584–1613. М.-Л., 1961., с. 111
  5. ^ Erb, Christina (April 17, 2007). "Russia to Allow Subsistence Hunting of Polar Bears". Archived from the original on May 14, 2007. Retrieved 2007-06-09.
  6. ^ a b "Wolf Hunting in Russia". Archived from the original on 2007-05-31. Retrieved 2007-06-09.
  7. ^ Chapter 10: Wolf Control Methods in Will Graves, and Valerius Geist, editors. Wolves in Russia. Detselig Enterprises Ltd. 210, 1220 Kensington Road NW, Calgary, Alberta T2N 3P5. USA.
  8. ^ , 272 pages
  9. ^ a b c Chapter 8: Wolfing for Sport in Barry Lopez' Of Wolves and Men, 1978 Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, USA.
  10. ^
    ISBN 978-1-55059-332-7. Archived from the original
    on 2009-08-02. Retrieved 2009-11-01.
  11. ^ "Hunting A History of Wolves in Russia". Evgeni Okhtin. Wolf Song of Alaska. Archived from the original on 1999-10-22. Retrieved 2007-09-12.
  12. ^ "In defence of Russia's wolves". bbc.co.uk. Archived from the original on 2005-04-06. Retrieved 2008-04-22.
  13. ^ Волки: серое нашествие (in Russian). Аргументы и факты. Retrieved 2008-08-14.
  14. ^ a b Савченко, Борис. Под царским прицелом (in Russian). Отдых в России. Archived from the original on 2007-02-27. Retrieved 2007-06-09.
  15. ^ a b Соловьев, Евгений. Охота с гончими как зеркало общественных трансформаций (in Russian). Независимая Газета. Archived from the original on 2007-03-29. Retrieved 2007-06-09.
  16. ^ a b Русский соколиный центр (in Russian). Retrieved 2007-06-10.
  17. ^ a b c d e Yurchenko, A. "Russian walrus hunting: history of crisis in the 19th century". Archived from the original on 2004-01-14. Retrieved 2007-06-09.

Primary sources

External links