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I was confused when I saw the term "bear baiting" in the title of the article.
In my area the term bear baiting refers to using a bait station to draw the bears in. Usually a 55 gallon drum full of some sort of odorous food serves as the bait station. The bear comes to eat and you shoot it. This is pretty common in my area. I know of at least 2 bait stations within 10 miles of me. There's probably more.
I don't see the appeal personally and IMO bears should only be taken in self defense. They don't even taste that good. But it's legal and many people enjoy it. I guess I also don't mind a few less bears in the general vicinity of my house. Especially the real big ones that most people prefer to shoot.
What they are referring to in Siberia as "bear bait" stations makes the U.S. bait stations look really humane in comparison.
Difficult topic, I think. I can say what I know - Siberia is huge. It is 5 or 6 time zones wide - the lower 48 states of the US - Maine to CA - only has 4. The whole US is only six wide if you include Alaska. Most of the land in Siberia is pretty empty, but there are a lot of tiny villages and towns. Not real close together - think Nebraska, but spread out a bit. East of the Urals heading into Siberia, you've got about a thousand miles of farmland interspersed with woodland tracts. There are a lot of wetlands throughout. Then you get to another thousand or so miles of forests, and eventually you get to some mountains and Lake Baikal. You've still got a thousand or two miles to get to the Kamchatka peninsula.
When I was there, the Russians told me there were still plenty of bear. The brown bears there are not like our black bears, but more like grizzlies. Big. Mean. Black bears are really shy in comparison.
I was in the west - next to the Urals. Didn't see much game around there - a couple of deer one day. But it was a lot of open country. And I think it was probably heavily hunted in the 90's. Over here we don't realize how badly the economy over there was depressed after the Soviet fell. For a lot of people that was like the Great Depression. A lot of the villagers still are very practical about getting meat where they can find it. You go east far enough, and the land gets wilder. In the US, we have so overrun the land, that the wildlife doesn't have many places to really be away from man. I don't think that is true in central and eastern Siberia. There sure is enough country out there that there could be a lot of wildlife.
I don't think anybody hunts as a "way-of-life" over there any more - except professional hunt guides. But there are hunters in the populace.
I know if I went bear hunting with dogs, I wouldn't want an inexperienced dog doing it - they'd likely get killed. And I don't believe the person in the Siberian Times article who tells us that no one would mismanage the bears and treat them badly. You get dumb behavior everywhere you find people. I don't know if that is the best way to train the dogs, or not.
But I try not to judge what somebody who lives in a different place and culture thinks. I would be more concerned with the overall population of bears - and with making sure they were doing well.
Yup, there are. Are you trying to make the point that there are a lot of people there? That's what it sounds like, so:
The Russians tend to congregate in cities even more than people in the US. But let's add all those cities together. Just doing this in my head now, so plus or minus a million - I get about 14 million. Close enough for you? Tell ya what, a couple of quick googles later, and Wikipedia quick facts tells me this:
Siberia: 13 M km(2) - that's 13 million square kilometers, with
36 M pop
The US: 9.8 M km(2), and
>325 M pop
That's roughly 14 million people in cities, in more land mass than the entire United States, including Alaska.
Let's find some comparable states in the US. At about 2.8 ppl per sq km, Siberia ranks as less empty than Alaska, Wyoming, and Montana, and just a little emptier than North and South Dakota. Those are the bottom 5 states in the US for pop density.
Alaska, btw, is a good comparison. About half of the people in Alaska live in and around Anchorage. A lot of the land borders on the Arctic circle. And outside Anchorage, Alaska is wild.
Point being - that is a heck of a lot of country out there where you are out of cell phone range.
I'm really getting away from my point here, and only because I know something of those three places.
People in Russia would not count Yekaterinburg or Chelyabinsk as being in Siberia. They are in the Urals.
Even in Kurgan, the locals might say, as one did to me, that they were really in the Ural region still. I hesitate calling Kurgan a city, despite the population count - I would call it a town. Go visit, you'll see what I mean. From Ekaterinburg east (Chelyabinsk is directly south of Ekaterinburg) you have farmland, with huge fields, interspersed with large tracts of forest and wetlands. This is Russia's wheat country. It stretches out, past Omsk, to Novosibirsk. The land does start changing after Omsk. If you go to a map, and zoom down to about a 50-mile wide view, you will see lots of villages in that stretch of country. After Novosibirsk, the number of villages will go way down.
The villages you see on the map will be anywhere from 200 people to 5,000. There are lots in the sub-1k range.
Yup, there are. Are you trying to make the point that there are a lot of people there? That's what it sounds like, so:
The Russians tend to congregate in cities even more than people in the US. But let's add all those cities together. Just doing this in my head now, so plus or minus a million - I get about 14 million. Close enough for you? Tell ya what, a couple of quick googles later, and Wikipedia quick facts tells me this:
Siberia: 13 M km(2) - that's 13 million square kilometers, with
36 M pop
The US: 9.8 M km(2), and
>325 M pop
That's roughly 14 million people in cities, in more land mass than the entire United States, including Alaska.
Let's find some comparable states in the US. At about 2.8 ppl per sq km, Siberia ranks as less empty than Alaska, Wyoming, and Montana, and just a little emptier than North and South Dakota. Those are the bottom 5 states in the US for pop density.
Alaska, btw, is a good comparison. About half of the people in Alaska live in and around Anchorage. A lot of the land borders on the Arctic circle. And outside Anchorage, Alaska is wild.
Point being - that is a heck of a lot of country out there where you are out of cell phone range.
The point I was making was that there are cities there, people think that it’s just little towns and villages. People aren’t trying to survive in the wilderness there, It’s similar to Canada in population and density.
It really depends. Let's take a place like Pyt-yah or Nefteyugansk. Yes, these are towns, with well-developed infrastructure, totally urban. But take an hour drive away - and it is all good old taiga. People living in these two towns would be typically oil and gas workers, pretty well paid - but again, an hour away and you will find people that will readily supplement their income by selling fur, for instance. Not to mention professional hunters or indigenous population.
Not really relevant to what goes on here in the US. Alaska is about the only place you can hunt brown bears. You can hunt with hounds in most states that have significant bear populations, but the hound hunters seem to do fine without using captive bears to train their dogs.
Talk to enough houndsmen and they will tell you there is a genetic factor to a lot of the hound behavior. Dogs that actively engage with a bear are way less likely to breed...they get killed, or they don't get killed but the hunter isn't going to breed a pack that he constantly has to stitch up.
The idea is for the dogs to "bay up" the bear and stay a safe distance while keeping it treed or whatever, or otherwise drive it in front of the hunters.
Hunting bears isn't like hunting deer in that bears don't have as predictable patterns, so for any level of success you have to use hounds or bait.
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