“The president’s chief of staff has decided to draft a bill that basically boils down to this: the criminalization of all stages of handling endangered animals such as tigers, leopards and snow leopards, including illegal production, trade, sale, storage and transportation,” Gizmatulin said at a press briefing.
The World Wildlife Fund Russia estimates that poachers kill 50 to 60 Amur tigers annually.
But estimates of the true extent of the trade in endangered species are hampered by a lack of data, said Vladimir Krever, of WWF Russia’s biodiversity program.
“All we have to go on is the occasional arrest of a middleman selling, for example, tiger skins,” Krever said. “A couple of recent arrests show that at least 18 tigers were killed in the last year or so.”
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