When he’s full, he climbs into his arms: “Scratch me.”

St. Petersburg seal Kroshik made friends with people and did not want to swim away from them: "Paper"

At the end of March 2016, a tiny seal came out to the fishermen, who surprised them near the village of Sviritsa, Leningrad Region, and began to ask for help. One of the fishermen took pity on the animal and took it to specialists. They called the seal Kroshik, went out and tried to set him free. But they didn't succeed. Vyacheslav Alekseev, the founder of the Baltic Seal Friends Foundation, who cared for the seal, told about the adventures of Kroshik to the publication Paper.

In 2016, the seal was brought to the St. Petersburg Center for the Study and Conservation of Marine Mammals, a project of the Friends of the Baltic Seal Foundation. Only two people work in the center - Vyacheslav Alekseev and Elena Andrievskaya. They do not attract volunteers, since seals require special care: “These are creatures with a fine mental organization, quivering. You need to follow a lot of nuances, constantly be on your guard and immediately respond if something goes wrong.”

When Kroshik hit the center, he weighed only four kilograms. He was left without a mother early and from the very beginning was set to communicate with people, says Alekseev: “He constantly climbed into his arms and tried to hug, he behaved very atypically for a seal.”

A few months later, in the summer of 2016, they tried to release the seal into Lake Ladoga. He swam for 15 minutes and returned. After this incident, Alekseev and Andrievskaya taught Kroshik to live independently for almost a year - and weaned him from communicating with people. The specialist recalls that the friendly behavior of the seal was stopped by improvised means: “with a mop, a rag, a rude word, they pushed him unkindly.” According to him, this usually works, since seals are touchy animals.

But Kroshik is not like that. In the summer of 2017, he was released back into the wild. He sailed away, but after a few weeks he began to come to people - and the experts decided to take him back to them.

Now Kroshik is either swimming in the pool or lying on a shelf. He eats fish, and when he has eaten, he climbs on his hands. Alekseev compares a seal with a cat: “It creeps up, starts biting at the clothes, tries to stir it up with a flipper, leans sideways like a cat, as if saying:“ Brush me. ” According to him, when visitors to the center scratched and crushed Kroshik's sides, he was blissful.

They will try to release the seal again in two years, when it reaches maturity. In the meantime, Kroshik does not want to become wild: “From the very beginning, there was a feeling that the files responsible for wildness were deleted in his brain. There was not even a hint that this program would ever be launched.”