When I was there they let me hold this eagle. It was a young bird they had trained to take fox and planned to start on wolves soon. The wolves there were not as big as our timber wolves. The one I shot was the size of a large coyote. You may be able to tell from the photo that I had been told not to have eye contact.
This is Kyrgyzstan near the Chinese border at an old hot spring resort the Ruskies developed. No road, no one lives within miles and those people are nomadic herdsman.