Humanitarian Environmental Magazine. Vol. 2. Is. 1. 2000. P. 16-19.

PROFESSIONALISM AND GOOD WILL AS ALTERNATIVE TO KILLING

A.A. Nikolsky

I attracted several times everyone's attention that zapovedniks and national parks should be the place where any life had special status and where the spirit of reverence for nature reigned. Killing on the territory of zapovednik contradicts with its nature conservation mentality. But my ideas do not find understanding with the zapovendniki's enthusiasts, they even get active inner resistance from the majority of them.

Usually research officers justify their non-ethical for the living inhabitants of zapovedniks actions by the fact that zapovedniks are the scientific-research institutions. Their assumptions include conducting zoological studies that inevitably require massive hunting for animals. To find out the scales of killing animals for scientific purposes on the territory of zapovedniks a questionnaire was sent to the Russian zapovedniks in 1998. It posed questions related to the massive killing of vertebrate animals for scientific purposes on the territory of zapovedniks. The answers were received from 20 zapovedniks. All the answers present the collective opinion of the scientific councils of zapovedniks. The query proved that scientific results of the works based upon the killing of animals were extremely low. Thus, every zapovednik bags about 100 animals a year in average. Mostly these are small mammals (rodents and insect-eaters). The number of birds is unexpectedly low and the number of amphibians is unexpectedly high. Averaging out the results we can derive that in all Russia on the territory of zapovedniks each year there are killed for scientific purposes about 10 thousand vertebrate animals. Only 20% of them goes to scientific collections of museums, and only 3% - to big centralized depositories available for any specialist. All the rest is probably thrown away – the fact that contradicts with the traditions of zoological practice and its professional ethics.

The majority of zapovedniks positively accepted the idea of the project of searching and introducing the methods alternative to the massive killing of animals, and did not consider answering the questions of the questionnaire a wasting of time.