Ecorazzi

News today of Russia’s Vladimir Putin hunting a tiger worried me. Would we seriously have a high-profile individual highlighting the sport of killing an endangered animal? Thankfully, beyond CNN’s doom-laden title of “Camouflaged Putin goes tiger shooting” — it turns out this hunt has a happy ending — and no loss of life.

Putin threw on the camo and embarked on a visit to the Far East, home of the rare Ussuri tiger. He participated in a hunt to track down an escaped 5-year-old female tigress after it had freed itself from a restraint. His job? To tranquilize the animal and fit it with a tracking collar. From the article,

“The televised footage showed Putin, deep in the woods, placing a collar with a tracking device around the knocked-out tiger’s neck and patting its cheek like a pet. ‘She’ll remember us,” he said. ‘The Ussuri tiger is a unique animal — it’s the biggest cat on the planet,’ Putin said later, according to the daily Izvestia.”

By some counts, there are fewer that 400 Ussuri tigers left, most of them in Russia and some in China. Despite being in the news bashing the West over the recent Georgia concflict, Putin had nothing but praise for U.S. efforts to also help protect the endangered species.