If you're on a hunting trip in Georgia and happen to kill the last animal of its kind in the country, no need to worry. Just make sure to pay for the license and the fee for each kill, and you can go wild massacring any unfortunate animal you bump into, endangered though it may be.
Desperate to attract tourists, Georgia has decided to allow the hunting of animals listed on the country’s Red List of protected species. Some critics think the controversial decision is another manifestation of the Georgian government’s obsession with deregulation and money-making.
When environmentalists look at the tur, for instance, they say they see a beautiful mountain goat antelope found (decreasingly) only in the west of the Caucasus, but economic development ministry officials, they claim, see thousands of lari they can charge for its killing.
Georgia’s environment minister has tried to convince journalists that the rare animals can be killed for their own good, and that the new rules will introduce order into the hunting sector and somehow help reduce poaching.
“A revolutionary government takes revolutionary decisions to find solutions,” preached Environment Minister Goga Khachidze to a journalist who pressed him about why the government had given the green flag to hunting endangered animals without first estimating the size of their population.
“I am not an idiot,” Khachidze added, in an attempt to reassure the unconvinced audience. The decision, he claimed, was not made on the fly and population estimates will be made in the future.
It’s a wolf-eat-dog situation in the southern Armenian mountain town of Sisian, which has become the epicenter of a gray invasion. Residents now avoid nighttime strolls to avoid encounters with hungry wolves roaming the streets. The animals have been driven out from nearby forests by heavy snow that blanketed the mountains with up to three meters of the white stuff.
The invaders, emboldened by hunger and an unusually harsh winter, reportedly are raiding the town and nearby villages, snatching up dozens of pet dogs, killing livestock and attacking humans.
In another neighbor, Georgia, the government’s wolf policy is diametrically opposed to that in Armenia. Both countries liberalized wolf hunting rules to help the population deal with increased attacks, but if in Armenia the state pays people to kill the predators, in Georgia hunters need to pay the state 100 laris (about $60.27) for a license to kill the animals.
Almost simultaneously, Armenia and Georgia have decided to rethink the ways of keeping themselves nice and tidy. Both countries' waste-management initiatives differ broadly, but have one common denominator -- both are likely to increase municipal cleaning fees.
The Armenian version, which allows local authorities to double the current cleaning rate to 400 drams (about $1.07) per family member, took flack from opposition lawmakers. Critics charge that linking the rate to the number of family members fails to reflect socio-economic differences in income and in rates of waste-generation.
“Five or six residents may be registered to reside in the castles of oligarchs, but the leftovers from [their] daily parties are clearly not comparable to the amount of garbage thrown out by an economically vulnerable family,” argued Armenian Revolutionary Federation-Dashnaktsutiun parliamentarian Arfik Minasian, Regnum.ru reported.
Another MP, Victor Dalakian, an independent, struck an even more populist note, saying that the Armenian government should concern itself more with an economic situation that has led to "a struggle between dogs and people" as they scavenge through waste, a practice in both Armenia and Georgia.
