A tiger has attacked several dogs in a village in the Russia's Far East, while wolves have been preying on livestock at nearby farms, local officials said Tuesday.
Responding to calls from frightened locals, gamekeepers found tracks left by a large tiger who had snuck into a village in the Primorye region on Monday night, RIA Novosti reported.
"The animal dragged away several dogs that were chained up and scared local residents," an unidentified official from the wildlife and game department said.
Inspectors believed that the tiger, though large, may be young, and could have walked into the village because it was wounded or "inexperienced," the unidentified official added.
"We are now trying to scare off the predator, but if that doesn't work, we will catch it and move it to a rehabilitation facility or to a far-off location," the official said.
Two young tigers approached human settlements in the Primorye region last year, and inspectors have caught the animals and moved them to "rehabilitation centers," the official said. Another tiger snatched a dog from a logging facility last month, but experts had concluded that the animal presented no danger to people because it wasn't starving or injured.
The Amur tiger is a highly endangered species, of which no more than 500 remain, all of them in the Primorye and Khabarovsk regions of the Far East.
A local non-profit organization, the Amur Tiger Center, has offered a 300,000 ruble ($9,000) reward for information about the hunters who shot and killed an Amur tiger in Leopard Land park in the Far East last month.
Farmers in Primorye have also complained that wolves have been attacking livestock in villages around the Poltavsky nature reserve, Interfax reported Tuesday. The Primorye administration has authorized park rangers to hunt down the animals.
Wolves have also been devouring deer and other livestock in northeastern Siberia, prompting the regional government in the republic of Sakha to allocated 34 million rubles to hunt wolves next year.
Contact the author at newsreporter@imedia.ru
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