Pyrenees farmers declare war after helicopter used to bring in a bear by air
BEAR lovers scored a key victory yesterday after French authorities secretly helicoptered a female Slovenian bear into the Pyrenees.
The bear was flown over roadblocks erected by local farmers, who say the animals pose a threat to their flocks.
Conservationists hope the female, soon to be joined by a second, will prevent the bear population from dying out in the western Pyrenees as only two lonely males – a father and son – are left in the area.
But a group of angry farmers wielding shepherd’s staffs had set up bales of hay and tractors along key roads into the Pyrenees from France to Spain, and had spent the night manning roadblocks in a bid to stop them being trucked in.
“It’s war,” it said in large letters daubed in white paint across the road.
“We saw the helicopter over Etsaut. It was hovering and let down a cage,” said Olivier Maurin, a local sheep farmer and organiser of the anti-bear protest.
Mr Maurin said farmers intended to launch a “hunt” in the woods, not to kill but to scare the bears away from their sheep and other livestock.
Jean-pierre Chourrout-pourtalet, the mayor of the small town of Sarrance, who joined farmers at one of the road blocks, pledged to chase the bears off the land.
“I have enacted a bylaw outlawing bears and wolves from within municipal borders, and I am duty-bound to see the law enforced,” he told AFP.
Anti-bear farmers have previously taken the law into their own hands, targeting the animals – which can weigh 250kg (40st) and stand two metres tall on their hind legs – with various traps, including one containing honey laced with glass.
François de Rugy, France’s environment minister, insisted the government would stand firm in its drive to shore up biodiversity – enshrined in a law passed this summer – by reintroducing bears to the area. He criticised “the unacceptable attitude” of those “who feel entitled to set up roadblocks and threaten me with guns”.
Not all farmers were against the bears’ presence. Elise Thebault, a sheep farmer from Etsaut, said: “The bears have always been here since the dawn of time. We have always lived side by side. You never see them, and it doesn’t affect our lives.”
The government compensates farmers for any livestock deaths from bear attacks, but that has failed to reduce tensions.
Bears were reintroduced from Slovenia in the Nineties after hunters all but wiped out France’s native population. The last time was in 2006, when five were freed near the Spanish border – but the lovelorn males, named Canellito and Néré, are the only ones left in the western Pyrenees.
Another 37 have been counted in the central section of the mountain range, but the two isolated males are unlikely to reach the group and would have to fight dominant males before being able to mate with the females.
The Ariège stretch of the Pyrenees has seen a doubling of bear attacks over the last two years to more than 230 so far in 2018, according to a local farmers’ union. Breeders in the area have lost at least 372 livestock so far this year, it claimed.