Nearly 170 ewes have been found dead in a mountain pasture in south-west France following throwing themselves into the void, breeders pointing the responsibility of the bear, while defenders of the plantigrade underline the absence of evidence .
“There is no doubt, 168 sheep throwing themselves into the void, there must be something behind them that pushes them,” the president of the Pastoral Federation of the department told AFP on Tuesday. Ariège, Alain Servat.
“We did not know the rocks before the presence of the bear,” he said.
For him, the only solution is for the French state to “take a decision today by saying ‘cohabitation (with the bear) is no longer possible'”.
“How many more tragedies before real solutions are offered to us?” Lamented the Association for the Protection of the Heritage of Ariège-Pyrenees (ASPAP) on its Facebook page, posting photos of dozens of dead sheep.
Same indignation on the side of the president of the department of Ariège, where the majority of the bears of the Pyrenees live.
“I am angry because the daily work of our breeders is undermined by a state that is deaf to calls for help,” wrote Christine Téqui on her Facebook page.
The day following the excavation, which occurred on Sunday, teams from the French Office for Biodiversity carried out observations on the spot.
“In most of the excavations, for 20 years, the results show that there is no indication of predation by the bear”, affirms for his part Alain Reynes, the director of the association Pays de l’ours- Adet.
“Anything can bring down a herd, a dog, a boar, a storm… But only if it’s the bear, or if we let people think it’s the bear, that it will be compensated (…) even in the absence of indications of predation”, he adds, deploring the “perversity of the system”.
Many breeders, hunters and local elected officials are opposed to the presence of the bear in the Pyrenees, defended by the State and associations for the defense of biodiversity.
While the plantigrade had practically disappeared from this mountain range, a program to reintroduce brown bears from Slovenia was initiated in the 1990s.
Today, they are around 70, according to the French authorities, in particular in the center of the Pyrenees, in Ariège on the French side, in the Val d’Aran on the Spanish side.
