Makes for much easier hunting, I guess...

Reuters.com

Russia probes reports Spanish king shot drunk bear

Thu Oct 19, 2006 3:51pm ET

MOSCOW (Reuters) - A Russian region has ordered an inquiry into a report that hunt organizers, keen to make the King of Spain's chances of killing a bear easier, provided a tame one drunk on vodka, a regional spokesman said Thursday.

"The governor has ordered a working group set up...to check the facts published in local press about the killing of the bear," said a spokesman for Vyacheslav Pozgalev, governor of the northwestern Vologda region.

National paper Kommersant carried a letter from Vologda's deputy chief of regional hunting resources management, Sergei Starostin, which accuses hunt organizers of plying a captive bear named "Mitrofan" with vodka-drenched honey and then forcing him from a cage to be shot by Spain's King Juan Carlos I.

"His majesty Juan Carlos killed Mitrofan with a single shot," Starostin wrote in his letter.

Russian hunt organizers are not complete strangers to such tactics. Keen hunter and former Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev had trouble with his aim in his later years. Some of the animals he liked to stalk were either tied to trees or plied with booze.