Wild Animals L.P.Sabaneev Copyright © Kaj Granlund 1. edition 2018.8.11 Front Page: Kaj Granlund TABLE OF CONTENTS FOREWORDS .........................................................................................................................................................5 INTRODUCTION ...................................................................................................................................................11 Chapter 1 - Geographical distribution of the wolf ..............................................................................................18 Notes on Chapter I .....................................................................................................................................32 Chapter 2 - Description of the wolf .............................................................................................46 Notes on Chapter II ....................................................................................................................................58 Chapter 3 - Wolves’ life in wintertime .................................................................................................................69 Notes on Chapter III ...................................................................................................................................76 Chapter 4 - Wolves’ summer ...............................................................................................................................81 Notes on Chapter IV ...................................................................................................................................89 Chapter 5 - Wolves’ food .....................................................................................................................................95 Animals not eaten by humans ..........................................................................................................99 Feathered game ..............................................................................................................................100 Four-legged game ..........................................................................................................................101 Domestic animals ...........................................................................................................................101 Notes on Chapter V ..................................................................................................................................110 HOW TO EXTERMINATE WOLVES ........................................................................................................................115 Chapter 1 - Hunting with dogs .........................................................................................................................117 Chapter 2 - Ancient hunting .............................................................................................................................122 Chapter 3 - Inconveniences in hunting with dogs ............................................................................................129 Chapter 4 - Hunting with guns .........................................................................................................................135 Chapter 5 - Hunting raids .................................................................................................................................140 Chapter 6 - Autumn hunting ............................................................................................................................146 Chapter 7 - Winter hunting ..............................................................................................................................150 Chapter 8 - Hunting with PSKOV ......................................................................................................................157 Chapter 9 - Pigs and carrion .............................................................................................................................168 Chapter 10 - Hunting with the golden eagle ....................................................................................................174 Chapter 11 - Chasing wolves ............................................................................................................................181 Chapter 12 - Extermination of wolves and wolf cubs ........................................................................................191 Chapter 13 - Hunting With Traps ......................................................................................................................200 Catching wolves with snares ....................................................................................................................201 Trapping ..................................................................................................................................................204 Articles and essays about the wolf question .....................................................................................................217 4 Introduction FOREWORDS This volume contains the works of Leonid Pavlovich Sabaneyev on “hunting wild animals”. The first part consists of an extensive monograph ”The Wolf”, the second included essays and articles on the biology of certain game animals and on the ways of hunting for them. The basic information about the work on the monograph on the wolf is found in 1876, when the 2nd congress of rifle hunters took place in Moscow on the agenda of which the question of ”measures to exterminate wolves” was the first. In the ”Protocol of the Congress of Messrs. hunters, held May 6, 1876 in the hall of the Polytechnic Muse- um, published as an annex to the May issue of the Journal of Hunting, summarizes the speech of L. P. Sabaneyev, who at the previous congress (January 8, 1876) was instructed to make the main presentation about this topic. L.P. Sabaneyev said that ”a detailed report on the instructions of the Imperial Society will soon be published in the appendix to the Journal of Hunting.” This work, entitled ”Wolf Question and Critical Review of Measures to the Destruction of the Wolf,” consists of 4 parts. Part 1 The first part examines the importance of the wolf question and provides statistics on the annual losses caused by this predator, equal to at least 3 million, which is likely to reach a much larger figure. Then they understand the reasons for the propagation of wolves, the main ones being cheapness of wolf fur, the prohibition of traps and poison, dog hunting and a lack of initiative on the part of not only the peasant population, but also the hunters themselves. The second part encompasses the natural history of the wolf, as far as it is needed to understand hunting and trapping these predators. In the third, all the known methods of catching wolves are described in more or less detail, and all the advantages and disadvantages of each are pointed out, in particular, attention is paid to the description of drive hunting and generally the least known methods of catching. The last part examines all the measures taken hitherto and proposed projects for the extermination of wolves. During the process, the initial project changed significantly. Above all, LP Sabaneyev began to work with the natural history of the wolf, which became the first part of the monograph ”The Wolf” and was not printed as an appendix to the ”Journal of Hunting” but was published in the 2nd edition of the collection ”Nature” from 1877. Accordingly, the methods of wolf extermination were now in part 2 of the monograph, but at the time of its publication neither the collection ”Nature” nor the ”Journal of Hunting” existed anymore: they merged and laid the foundation for the journal Nature and Hunt, which during 1878 - 1879 published 12 chapters from the second part. In the October issue of 1881 there was another article - ”Ways of exterminating wolves”, but without continuing the numbering of previous chapters. Only a footnote on other ways of hunting, described in the previous chapters, published in 1878 and 1879, indicates the connection of this essay with the second part of the monograph ”The Wolf”. The work on the wolf remained unfinished. In the above-mentioned last publication (the October issue of the journal Nature and Hunting from the year 1881), the author notes: ”This latter method is, as it were, a transition to the poisoning of wolves, which is the subject of the following article.” However, the ”next article” was not published either then or later. None of the third part (originally the first one) was written by L.P. Sabaneyev, in which he promised the readers to ”cover some issues of the wolf propagation”, nor the 4th about various projects of wolf extermination. 6 Forewords For a modern reader-hunter, such incompleteness of the monograph has absolutely no significance. The parts written by L.P. Sabaneyev had an important fundamental significance for the author’s contemporaries, for the solution of the ”wolf question”, which was so vigorously discussed in the pages of hunting publications in the 70s of the last century. In our own days, these parts would be of interest only to a limited number of hunting historians, and the ”wolf question” of our time, which once again agitated the hunting minds almost a hundred years later, has completely different aspects. A hundred years ago, before the contemporaries of L.P. Sabaneyev, there was no ques- tion: to destroy or not to destroy wolves? Th e answer