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King of Spain Shoots a Drunken Bear Dead
// A domesticated bear falls a prey to an abominable performance
King of Spain Juan Carlos I, who was on a visit to Russia in August, has killed a domesticated bear, as Sergey Starostin, deputy head of Vologda Region’s Hunting Grounds Preservation Department, reported to Vologda Governor Vyacheslav Pozgalev. What is more, the king made the bear drunk.
Juan Carlos I visited Vologda Region in late August. The king and his retinue stayed at the House of the Wood Grouse recreation zone near the village of Limonovo. The place had earlier welcomed celebrities as film director Nikita Mikhalkov, Russian Emergency Situations Minister Sergey Shoigu and former Finance Minister Mikhail Zadornov. The Spanish guest did not make a secret of the fact that he had come to that middle of nowhere only because of hunting.
Two months after the visit, details of the royal hunting have leaked. “An abominable performance accompanied the hunting of King of Spain Juan Carlos,” Starostin tells Vologda Regions’s government in a letter. “The party ‘sacrificed’ a good-humored and jolly bear called Mitrofan who had been kept at a farm in the village of Novlenskoye. The bear was put in a cage and taken to the place of hunting. Afterwards, the party made him drunk with vodka mixed with honey, and pushed him out to the field. Quite naturally, the massive drunken animal became an easy target. His Majesty Juan Carlos killed Mitrofan with one shot.”
Sergey Starostin gave more examples where domesticated animals from recreation zones happened to be trophies of guests. “A similar performance was staged in early 2006 for Alexander Khokhlov, editor-in-chief of Moscow’s Safari magazine. He was given a wolf for killing from the farm of Volgograd Region Deputy Governor Sergey Gromov where another dozen of wolf cub are waiting for their doleful fate,” the official writes. A TV crew from NTV once were offered a 3-year-old lynx from a farm in the settlement of Peski. The lynx was gnawed by hounds.
Starostin reports that the organization of this kind of hunting is masterminded by Andrey Filatov, head of the Russian agricultural watchdog’s Vologda branch, and the region’s Deputy Governor Sergey Gromov who is in charge of farming. “I have repeatedly tried to express my concern over the affairs in hunting farming to them,” Starostin notes. “But it never gave any result.” The hunting farming official finishes the letter, calling on the governor “not to let these officials to turn hunting into bloody clownery.”
An employee from Sergey Starostin’s department who asked to be unidentified mentioned a tiff between Starostin and Filatov. The source says that Sergey Starostin allegedly got a hint that he had better offer his resignation. Perhaps, the official decided to send this letter to the government after this.
Starostin told Kommersant that Governor Vyacheslav Pozgalev who knew about Juan Carlos’s successful hunting had no idea that the bear was not a hunting one. “A very few people knew about this accident,” the official said. “But this number may become bigger in certain circumstances.”
Andrey Ivanov, Vologda
All the Article in Russian as of Oct. 19, 2006
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