No more selfie with eagle! The bird was seized from the owners

As we reported, for several days now, in the center of Uzhgorod, on Teatralna Square, two young men have been offering people to take pictures with a real steppe eagle. However, many Uzhgorod residents were outraged by the fact that they kept the bird of prey on the rope; they regarded the situation as an abuse.

And today, February 14, the police received several calls to Teatralna square to determine the legality of such actions and the ownership of the bird.

As a result, according to the representatives of the NGO FORZA, after the procedural measures, the eagle was seized from the owners and temporarily put to the Transcarpathian regional ecological and naturalistic center of student youth. 

On the page of NGO Forza on Facebook, a representative of the organization reported:

The situation with the bird on the rope has several important aspects: 

ecological – whether the bird is healthy, needs special care, treatment; 

legal – what to do with the eagle, which should live in wildlife, and who will deal with this, since we, FORZA, are not ornithologists, but simply concerned people;

moral – people were not just walking indifferently past, moreover – they would pay money to make a photo, even when we tried to explain that this is a bird that is listed in the Red Book.

I only want to add that they had no documents for the bird, they showed us a photo of a veterinary passport for a "cat / dog" issued in Ivano-Frankivsk, the bird has 2 wounds under the right wing, visible in the photo.

I am sincerely grateful to all who have already helped, consulted by phone, and will also be grateful for any advice, support and dissemination of the information.