[CAT] Did Vladimir Putin kill a Siberian tiger to look good?

[rfmcdonald]

One nice thing about Livejournal is that, for people who have or can technologically emulate fluency in Russian, you can learn of all kinds of things bubbling under in the Russosphere. I'd first heard of speculation that, through the desire Vladimir Putin's people for an impressive photo op, they gave a Siberian tiger a dose of anesthetic that eventually killed it, via demographer's post here. Anastasia Kirilenko's Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty article "Sleeping Tiger, Hidden Agenda?" summarizes the case appeared later.

Serga, the Siberian tigress [. . .] was photographed with Putin after being tranquilized midpounce by the gun-toting, conservation-loving prime minister.

A video on Putin's website recounts the event, which took place when the tiger was caught in a trap set by researchers during a 2008 visit by the prime minister to the Ussuri reserve in Siberia.

"Vladimir Putin decided to walk closer to the trap, and appeared on the trail at the very moment when the tigress leaped out," the news announcer says. "He fired from a special tranquilizer gun, hitting the beast in the right shoulder..."

Putin later tagged the sleeping tiger with a satellite-tracking device. Since then, Serga has occasionally returned to the media spotlight with news of her own, most notably the birth of three cubs in 2009. (The "Vladivostok" newspaper ran the story under a banner headline reading, "After Meeting Vladimir Putin, A Tigress Has Given Birth To Three Cubs.")

But animal activists and the Russian blogosphere now say that Serga, commonly referred to as "Putin's tiger," is in fact a substitute cat -- and that the original tigress was not wild but rather a zoo animal who was borrowed for the stunt and later died as a result of a sedative overdose.

Dmitry Molodtsov, a St. Petersburg-based ecological engineer, is the founder of bigcats.ru, a website devoted to tigers and other wild cats.

He says he has concluded from photographs and Internet articles that the actual tiger in the Putin pictures was not the wild Serga but Aralia, a zoo tiger who was sedated and held in a trap for nearly six hours before her encounter with the prime minister.

"When you look at various pictures of Serga -- the tigress they're now saying is Putin's tigress -- it's easy to see that the pattern on her coat doesn't change over time," Molodtsov says. "Depending on the time of year, a tigress becomes fluffier -- in winter, of course, her markings are more indistinct -- but nothing more than that. And the tigress who was with Putin -- and some witnesses have suggested it was another tigress, Aralia -- had completely different markings."

[. . .]

Natalya Remennikova, the coordinator of the Siberian tiger-conservation project that Putin so famously participated in, says no substitute tigers were used in Putin's brush with big cats, and that Serga herself is alive and thriving.

"Serga was definitely the one who was tagged in 2008 with the help of the prime minister. This tigress is alive, and she's doing well," Remennikova says. "She's living on the territory of the Ussuri reserve. People who don't have reliable information -- especially people who don't know much about science -- try to make everything political."

demographer's post is available in English translation via this link. The crux of the argument, that Siberian tigers have identifiable and unchanging markings and that these markings either prove or disprove the hypothesis that Serga met an unfortunate end, is beyond my ability to judge.

People?