Rewilding Madness in the Pyrenees

steveR

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Mixed Farmer

Brown bears vs farmers: the dark side of rewilding​

It is hailed as a triumph of conservation - but the return of these apex predators to the Pyrenees is having a profound impact on farmers

ByJoe Shute, SENIOR FEATURE WRITER17 July 2022 • 6:00am

The bear population in the Pyrenees is higher than it has been in a century

The bear population in the Pyrenees is higher than it has been in a century CREDIT: Courtesy of Generalitat de Catalunya
Vultures are circling over the high passes on the Cirque de Gérac. The birds swoop in and out of the early morning fog, scanning the pastures below for signs of fresh meat. There are rich pickings in this wild and remote valley in the Ariège region of the French Pyrenees; a place where death can now strike at any time.
As I walk down the mountain slopes with shepherd Philippe Périssé to inspect his flock, we find the remains of a recently killed sheep, the bones stripped clean. Nearby its hide has been expertly skinned from the body. Philippe flips it over with his ganchou (the Pyrenean version of a shepherd’s crook) to find his family moniker ‘SA’ stamped on the bloody wool.
‘It was a bear,’ he says, grimly. ‘They will walk off with the sheep in their mouths like a fox with a chicken.’
The fog swirling around us is common in this region, enveloping the jagged peaks and scree slopes and rolling over the meadows. Bears have notoriously poor eyesight and so, Périssé says, have adapted to time their attacks with the weather, creeping towards the noise of the tinkling bells the sheep wear around their necks.
The bells are part of a pastoralist tradition to locate their animals on the mountains, although the bears are also now taking advantage of this to launch surprise attacks. ‘Sometimes when the weather is like this I will stand here and listen to the bears crunching the bones through the mist,’ Périssé tells me as we walk, his three border collies hugging close to our side.
This is bear country: the epicentre of the remarkable return of these apex predators to the Pyrenees over the past 26 years. The animals were once commonplace across the Pyrenees (a 270-mile-long mountain range running along the border between France and Spain), but over the course of the 20th century were pushed to the edge of extinction, with just half a dozen or so animals remaining.

In 1996 it was decided to reintroduce bears, with successive releases of 11 brown bears from Slovenia. At the most recent count there are now 70 bears roaming the Pyrenees – the highest number for a century.
The astonishing success of the scheme has been hailed by conservationists across the globe as a cornerstone of rewilding, and one that should inspire similar efforts elsewhere, including in the UK.
Indeed, when he became chief executive of The Wildlife Trusts in 2020, Craig Bennett argued in an interview with The Telegraph that, alongside beavers and lynx, bears should be reintroduced to Britain, having been extinct since the Middle Ages (although he added any such release would be ‘a long way off’).

Philippe Périssé has a flock of about 300 Tarasconnaise sheep

Philippe Périssé has a flock of about 300 Tarasconnaise sheep CREDIT: Milie Del
Philippe Périssé has an altogether different view. ‘It is like living with a lion,’ he argues.
Bears are omnivores and successional feeders. When they emerge from hibernation in late winter they will eat the carcasses of animals they discover in the snowmelt before progressing on to fruits and berries throughout the year, which they supplement with small mammals. As their population has expanded, the bears have developed a particular taste for sheep, targeting the flocks of the pastoralist shepherds like Périssé who graze the mountain meadows.
The animals are also coming into regular conflict with hunters. Last November in Ariège a hunter nearly died after surprising a female bear and her cubs. The bear severed a femoral artery in the 70-year-old’s leg before he shot it dead. Despite his injuries, he survived, but could yet face trial after it emerged he was hunting in a nature reserve. It is a case that encapsulates the divides over the return of the bears. In June a group of hunters protested outside a local police station against the ongoing investigation.

Elsewhere farmers have blocked roads and even dumped the corpses of sheep killed in bear attacks at local town halls.
A number of bears have also met a bloody end. Since the reintroduction programme started, about 50 have died, seven were by human hands. In early 2020 one of the reintroduced bears, a six-year-old male called Cachou, was discovered lying at the bottom of a ravine having ingested a stomachful of antifreeze. Despite police launching a wide-ranging investigation into the killing of a protected animal, no one has yet been prosecuted.
Two years ago Périssé, an athletic 53-year-old possessing a shepherd’s gait and the crooked nose of a former rugby player, discovered the body of another brown bear close to where we are standing. Fortunately, he tells me, he was with a forest ranger at the time, otherwise suspicion would have fallen upon him. After all, like many of the farmers here, he has bad blood with the bears.
Between himself and the five other sheep farmers, known as éleveurs, who graze their flocks together in the mountains during summer to better protect against bear attacks, he says ‘hundreds’ of sheep are killed every year. Most feared by the shepherds is something called a dérochement, where a single bear attack sends an entire flock tumbling down a mountain slope.
The French government pays out compensation (about €200-250 per animal) and grants to help mitigate the costs of dealing with the bears. These include paying for electric fences, and hiring shepherds to stay with the flocks up on the mountain. None the less, Périssé estimates the extra cost to be around €4,000-5,000 per year per farmer.
Périssé, who has a flock of about 300 Tarasconnaise (a local hardy breed), is a stickler for tradition; which is why he would never contemplate removing the bells from his animals, despite them attracting bears. He proudly tells me his family has farmed sheep in this part of the Pyrenees since at least the French Revolution. In the family farmhouse built in 1832, where he lives, he has a picture above the stairs of his great-great-grandfather posing with a bear cub.
He tells me he used to go out and shoot the mothers and then steal the offspring to turn into performing bears to tour the local villages of Ariège. ‘The story of the bears is the story of my family,’ he says.

Sheep bones are an all too common sight for Pyrenean shepherds

Sheep bones are an all too common sight for Pyrenean shepherds CREDIT: Milie Del
But now the bears are winning. As a result of the increasing attacks, he says, 69 éleveurs across the Pyrenees have quit in recent years. He too fears he may be the last in his family. His 27-year-old daughter now lives in Guadeloupe while his 22-year-old son works as a butcher in nearby Toulouse, and neither have shown any intention of taking the business on.
It is not just bears, of course. In France, as in the UK, the next generation are increasingly turning their backs on rural traditions, while the small-scale pastoralists who pride themselves on the quality of meat and cheese their flocks produce are struggling to compete against intensive farming practices. But Périssé particularly blames his new neighbours for hastening the decline. ‘Lots of éleveurs are quitting,’ he says. ‘This is the death of pastoralism.’
As he points out the various locations where bears have been seen recently (he personally has encountered them five times on the mountains), I wonder if he would once again like to see the animals entirely extirpated from Ariège?
‘Bien sur,’ he grins.
And yet, bears belong here. Fossilised remains have confirmed brown bears living in the Pyrenees around 200,000 years ago – if not longer. The pastoralists, too, have been driving their livestock on to the high mountain slopes each summer for thousands of years in a process that is steeped in tradition and known as the transhumance. They have managed to coexist before, so why not again?
One possible solution is the use of Pyrenean mountain dogs known as patous. The dogs, whose snowy white manes belie a ferocious temperament, were once a mainstay of mountain shepherds. They are reared alongside the sheep and spend their lives with the flock, attacking anything they deem a threat – including people.
Use of the dogs dwindled with the bear populations in the Pyrenees over the course of the 20th century as they were no longer deemed necessary to ward off the predators, but now many shepherds are again increasingly relying on patous. However in Ariège in particular, many are reluctant to bring the dogs up on to the mountains for fear of them attacking tourists.
Anne-Lawre Brault, a 40-year-old shepherd who for the past three summers has marshalled a flock of sheep in Ariège, says while she personally would welcome working with patous for greater security, because of that concern about attacks on tourists, she is continuing to use a team of three Border collies. She keeps a can of anti-bear spray in the orange van where she sleeps at night. ‘If I am ever that close to a bear I don’t think I will be able to use it,’ she admits.
Another Ariège sheep breeder, Robin Cazalet, also admits his reluctance to use the dogs, despite losing more than 220 sheep to bears over the past three years. ‘If a human comes by they can attack,’ says the 27-year-old. ‘It is a lot of pressure for us. We are trying to do our normal work and now must take care of the dogs. It feels like the bears are destroying everything.’
We are talking in a cattle shed on the Cazalet farm. Robin insists that he takes the importance of protecting a landscape that has sustained his family for generations extremely seriously. He doesn’t use any chemicals on his farm, keeps a small flock of 230 breeding sheep which do not overgraze the mountain meadows, and as we speak housemartins flit in and out of the windows, nesting in the eaves of the barn.
The overwhelming popular support among conservationists, politicians and the wider public for the reintroduction of bears has in turn, he says, demonised the farmers losing livestock to them. ‘What is really hard is the pressure of public opinion. It is always against us and it makes us feel like murderers when actually we are the victims.’
He admits he is now contemplating giving up a career that he felt he was born to do. When I mention the possibility of bears also returning 
to the UK one day, his eyes widen in shock. ‘It would be an economic catastrophe,’ he cautions.
Responsibility for the bears is complicated by the porous borders of the Pyrenees, which span France, Spain and Andorra. The majority of the bears have been released in Melles – a French border village in the Haute-Garonne region – although they have since settled in a swathe of land between Ariège and the Catalan Pyrenean regions of Val d’Aran, Pallars Sobirà and Alta Ribagorça, where it is estimated up to 65 bears occupy a land mass of between 3,000 and 4,000 sq km.
'We are made to feel like murderers when we are the victims,' says Périssé

'We are made to feel like murderers when we are the victims,' says Périssé CREDIT: Milie Del
Santiago Palazón, a 56-year-old biologist employed by the government of Catalonia, has been involved with every introduction since 1996. That year the first two female bears were released – named Ziva and Melba – before being joined the following year by a male called Pyros.
A strapping alpha weighing more than 300kg, he has since gone on to sire more than 30 cubs. There has been no sign of him for the past three years and he is now considered dead, although even in his absence, to have so much of the burgeoning population linked to one bear has raised fears over inbreeding and poor genetic diversity in the Pyrenean bears.
Palazón is leading me through a steep forest of pine and fir in the Val d’Aran along a route regularly patrolled by bears. It is mating season and so the animals – profligate breeders who will copulate with several partners – are on the prowl.
Palazón has encountered bears in the wild more than 20 times and tells me there is no need to worry – unless we accidentally surprise the bears. When out on his own he will talk loudly to himself. ‘It is better if the bears know we are here,’ he tells me as we clamber through the dense forest.
The released bears were initially monitored through satellite tracking, but now, due to the difficulty of recapturing them to attach a collar, not a single bear is monitored. Instead the population is measured through camera traps and genetic testing of fur samples and bear faeces. He estimates the population is growing by about 10 per cent a year. Ultimately, he argues, there is sufficient habitat across the Pyrenees to sustain more than 400 bears.
At various points in the mountains, conservationists wrap barbed wire around large trees and train an automatic camera upon them. The bears come along and rub their backs on the wire, leaving behind samples of fur which are then sent for genetic testing. After a gruelling two-hour hike through the mountains, we arrive at one such backscratcher with fresh golden clumps of bear fur caught in the wire.
The camera footage shows a large male rubbing itself against the trunk. Palazón has measured himself up against the same tree and, when standing on its hind legs, the beast is a good head taller than the biologist, who is 6ft 2in and quite bear-like himself.
But misdemeanours notwithstanding, Palazón gives an impassioned defence of bears. ‘They have always lived here and people have killed them. It is an ethical duty to bring them back.’

He stresses their return also serves a vital ecological purpose. As bears roam they gobble up seeds, which they then disperse through their scats, helping to boost biodiversity. Meanwhile, as apex predators they also serve an important role in managing populations of deer and wild boar which are exploding across the Pyrenees.

As with the UK, where the Government has mooted a fresh cull of wild deer to contain a population that has spread to two million (a number not seen since the Norman Conquest), if left unchecked the animals can have a detrimental impact by destroying young trees.
Researchers call this the ‘landscape of fear’ where, although the actual number of animals eaten by bears is minimal, they still effect large-scale change by restricting the movement of species afraid of becoming prey. The most famous example of this is in Yellowstone National Park in the US, where wolves were reintroduced in 1995.

One YouTube video, which has been viewed more than 43 million times, argues that the wolves have reshaped the river valley as elk became less likely to graze there due to fear of attack. Researchers have since challenged this thesis, claiming there are other factors beyond the wolves, such as the growing numbers of mountain predators and climate change.

'Everyone wants the bears back but no one wants to live next to them,' says Périssé

'Everyone wants the bears back but no one wants to live next to them,' says Périssé CREDIT: Milie Del
According to Palazón, the ‘landscape of fear’ engendered by the bears is also attracting tourists. Increasingly, guided walks are taking people into forests populated by bears, creating a new stream of revenue for locals. ‘Even if people cannot see bears they want to be in a forest where there is the possibility of seeing them,’ he says.

This is the root of the divide over the reintroduction of the bears, one that has crystallised around the issue of town versus country. For tourists and people living outside of the Pyrenees, it is of course a thrill to have such wild animals back in Europe, even if we may never encounter them.
The bears also represent the righting of an ecological wrong – restoring an apex predator nearly expunged by humanity. But for those dealing with the daily reality of bear attacks, the return of the animals is an altogether different prospect.
As Périssé points out, unlike in Yellowstone, in the Pyrenees farmers, too, are sharing this landscape. ‘Everyone wants the bears back,’ he says. ‘But no one wants them living next to them.’

Perhaps though, amid the acrimony, a rapprochement is slowly being reached. The latest figures released by the French government in December suggested that attacks on livestock had fallen nine per cent on the previous year. Officials cite enhanced protection measures, such as the use of patou mountain dogs and electrified fences, as well as nocturnal monitoring of flocks for ‘contributing to the drop’.
Meanwhile, every year fresh cubs are born and slowly repopulate the Pyrenees. It is an experiment that is proving unpredictable, bloody and at times downright savage, but one that can be deemed a success on its own terms. For the mountains grow wilder by the day.
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BAF

Member
Livestock Farmer
Didn't read it all because I got bored. But the problem with rewilding is it doesn't incorporate a population control element. People get very upset about hunting but regulated hunting especially what people regard as "trophy" hunting does more to restore populations of endangered species than any cat hair slipper wearing, yoghurt knitting rewilding types. Guess where there's more elephants, lions etc in Africa? It's not in the national parks where hunting is verboten.
So rewilding as a concept isn't necessarily a bad concept but as this article probably points out its never put into practise well
 

unlacedgecko

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They say bear threat can be countered by use of guard dogs, but admit a risk to tourists. Then add nocturnal monitoring of flocks can help. Who is going to pay for that? 300 ewes wouldn't support it.
 

BAF

Member
Livestock Farmer
They say bear threat can be countered by use of guard dogs, but admit a risk to tourists. Then add nocturnal monitoring of flocks can help. Who is going to pay for that? 300 ewes wouldn't support it.
My friend has 3 Caucasian Shepherd's. They would definitely scare off or eat a bear and wolves. But I have no doubt they'd also eat people they don't know!
 

Ffermer Bach

Member
Livestock Farmer
My friend has 3 Caucasian Shepherd's. They would definitely scare off or eat a bear and wolves. But I have no doubt they'd also eat people they don't know!
Last TB test I had a Romanian Vet here doing the test. I asked him about Wolves in Romania, and using dogs living with the flocks to protect them from the Wolves. His opinion was, even the most ferocious of dogs were no match for a Wolf.
 

unlacedgecko

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Livestock Farmer
Location
Fife
Last TB test I had a Romanian Vet here doing the test. I asked him about Wolves in Romania, and using dogs living with the flocks to protect them from the Wolves. His opinion was, even the most ferocious of dogs were no match for a Wolf.

No, but they don't need to be. The dogs just need to present enough of a risk to the wolf that it looks for easier prey elsewhere.
 

BAF

Member
Livestock Farmer
Last TB test I had a Romanian Vet here doing the test. I asked him about Wolves in Romania, and using dogs living with the flocks to protect them from the Wolves. His opinion was, even the most ferocious of dogs were no match for a Wolf.
Just have a look on YouTube aside from the fact theyve got godawful music over the top of them and most seem to be filmed on a potato there's plenty of videos showing Caucasian Shepherd's and Shepherd/Mastiff/Livestock protection dogs nailing wolves.
 

unlacedgecko

Member
Livestock Farmer
Location
Fife
my point being times move on...the 'wheel turns'......time for bears to return the 'cruelty' inflicted on them perhaps

Jesus are you serious?!

How you gonna react when some invading tribesman applies the same to you and your family/farm? I'm sure they could justify it due to the actions of your ancestors under the auspices of the British Empire.
 

unlacedgecko

Member
Livestock Farmer
Location
Fife
Just have a look on YouTube aside from the fact theyve got godawful music over the top of them and most seem to be filmed on a potato there's plenty of videos showing Caucasian Shepherd's and Shepherd/Mastiff/Livestock protection dogs nailing wolves.

They're either fictional films or propaganda against defanged/drugged wolves. There's not a dog alive to beat a grey/timber wolf in 1v1.
 

spin cycle

Member
Location
north norfolk
Jesus are you serious?!

How you gonna react when some invading tribesman applies the same to you and your family/farm? I'm sure they could justify it due to the actions of your ancestors under the auspices of the British Empire.

in my village we still have 5 farmers who live/have land.....in less than 20 years...there might be one (50/50 chance).....the local agribusiness contract farmers expanded 40% last year in one go....they could incorporate all of us without a 'burp'

we (the farmers) are the 'tribesmen' and the 'empire' will take us all

as i said 'the wheel turns'
 
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Red Tractor drops launch of green farming scheme amid anger from farmers

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quote: “Red Tractor has confirmed it is dropping plans to launch its green farming assurance standard in April“

read the TFF thread here: https://thefarmingforum.co.uk/index.php?threads/gfc-was-to-go-ahead-now-not-going-ahead.405234/
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