Elite start hunting exotic animals

November 8, 2008

I'm going to be sick. I hope for lots of bad accidents there.

Elite start hunting exotic animals29 October, 21:57 | Kristina Berdynskyh, Korrespondent

Yuriy KryvenkoElite start hunting exotic animals

Trophy hunting becomes a favorite pastime among Ukraine’s elite taking them to every corner of the earth

It includes expensive foreign trips, an adrenaline rush, killing and a trophy.

It’s the new fashion among the rich, and it horrifies animal rights protectors.

It’s called trophy hunting.

“Sweat was rolling down my face. My clothes were drenched. But I knew I had to get that beast.”

That’s how Oleksandr Torhashyn talks about one of his hunting experiences. Sitting comfortably in his Kyiv office, the president of several law firms flips through photos and recalls several exhilarating hunting trips to Africa. They depict a smiling hunter with a dead lion, leopard, an African buffalo and even a six-ton elephant.

For his happiness to be complete, Torhashyn only needs to shoot a rhino. Once he has done that, he will collect Africa’s five hottest hunting trophies.

Torhashyn, like many other Ukrainian VIP hunters, is crazy about rare animal trophies.

“It used to be that hunting was a pleasure and a hobby: you have a day out, a drink. Now well-off people go hunting for trophies and use expensive weapons,” says Serhiy Zerubin, director of Ohotturservis, a company that organizes hunting trips.

Businessmen and affluent lawmakers alike are big fans. When the typical game they find in Ukraine, such as deer and boars, is no longer enough, they go for exotic animals, typically in Africa.

According to the Ukrainian Society of Hunters and Fishermen, among the 300,000 Ukrainian hunters there are about 2-3 percent who prefer trophy hunting. Ten percent of the 10,000 wild ungulates shot in Ukraine every year are hunted for trophy collections. Ukrainian fans of outstanding horns, animal skulls, fangs and skins spend a lot of time and money enlarging their home collections.

Die-hard hunter Volodymyr Syvkovych, a parliament deputy from the Region’s party, used to settle for so-called group hunting, but has switched to trophy hunting, where the game, danger and rush can be bigger, and you always come home with a trophy.

“It’s not so interesting anymore to shoot for the sake of it. If you come to hunt, you’ve got to have a trophy,” he says.

Syvkovych is the proud owner of 12-kilo deer horns and a stuffed wild boar that weighs nearly half a ton. He mostly hunts in his private hunting ground on the border of Kyiv and Zhytomyr oblasts. He only hunts local beasts, unlike Oleksandr Volkov, a former parliament deputy, who has a collection of exotic stuffed African animals.

Hunting for trophies was fashionable in the Soviet Union, says Volodymyr Nyzhnyk, a hunting expert from the Ukrainian hunters and fishermen society.

“But it was limited to government members and top country officials. Now this fashion is widespread among politicians as well as [the rich] 'New Ukrainians,'” he says.

Hunting for trophies requires a lot of patience and preparation. It’s nearly impossible to get a rare specimen without the help of professional chasseurs. They are the ones that set up the hunt so that a particular beast gets to a particular hunter. The latter just shoots and scoops up his trophy.

In Ukraine, hunting farms charge hunters depending on the weight of the animal and the value of the trophy. The cost of killing a European roe deer starts at $300. A wild boar starts at $600. A dappled deer starts at $1,000 and a royal stag starts at $3,500.

To have a roe head stuffed you’ll have to pay another $150-300, which is modest compared to the $450-700 you would have to pay for stuffing a royal deer’s head. A boar’s head will cost $150-600, according to Trofeiniy Dim company workers who specialize in taxidermy, or animal stuffing.

Exotic trophy lovers have to pay a lot more for their hobby. To kill a leopard in Africa they have to cough up $5,000. A lion goes for $14,000 and an elephant for $20,000. Rhinos are the most expensive. The right to kill one costs $55,000.

But that’s not their biggest expense.

Hunters pay $2,000 per day to be guided in the wilderness of Africa. It can take six to 12 days to kill an elephant.

The steep price doesn’t stop the affluent and adventurous hunters.

Lawyer Torhashyn has a collection of 50 trophies that he keeps in his country house.

“My wife is afraid to stumble over a stuffed animal when she wakes up at night,” he explains.

He proudly demonstrates the horns of a rare Namibian gnu – a trophy that gave him recognition among world collectors because it was included in the Book of Records of Safari Club International, an organization that describes its goal as “protecting the freedom to hunt and promoting wildlife conservation.”

Ecologists say conservation is the last thing on the trophy hunters’ minds. They are actually destroying some rare animals.

“Trophy hunting has led to the shooting of over 1,000 rare bison in the last 15 years [in Ukraine],” said Volodymyr Boreiko, director of the Kyiv ecological and cultural center. Ukraine has banned bison hunting now, but a few years ago specialized companies offered this type of entertainment if you were willing to pay $1,500-5,000 per each animal shot.

The ecologist is outraged by the fact that trophy hunting is promoted by the nation’s leaders and politicians. They are shooting the best species for their collections, he claims.

A few years ago, his organization made a blacklist of hunters that listed those with “large collections of personally destroyed animals, who make a business on the blood and suffering of animals.”

Apart from Sivkovych and Volkov, the list includes former presidents Leonid Kuchma and Leonid Kravchuk, Regions party lawmakers Nestor Shufrych, ex-premier Victor Yanukovych and Dmytro Shentsev.

Sivkovych says they have nothing to be blamed for since the trophies are made from animals that need to be destroyed for the sake of the species anyway. These include, for example, old boars that stand in the way of the young ones.

“A boar like that is harmful for the forest because it cripples younger boars and breaks the backs of sows,” he says.

Anton Yatsenko, a lawmaker from Yulia Tymoshenko’s bloc who authored a draft law banning hunting in Ukraine, isn’t convinced.

“In the 21st century, there should be no animal killing. [The hunters] should collect stamps or post cards rather than kill,” he says

http://www.kyivpost .com/nation/ 30690