Mr Putin is well known for his brushes with wildlife and wrote in a magazine article in 2010 that he enjoyed "events involving the participation of fauna". In 2008 he shot an Amur tiger with a tranquilliser gun so that it could be tracked, and in 2010 he fired a dart from a crossbow to get a skin sample from a grey whale in Russia's Far East. The same year the then Russian prime minister hugged a slumbering polar bear and fitted it with an electronic collar.