Friday, March 29

The Government tries to stop the Asturias plan to hunt wolves in the Picos de Europa National Park


The Government considers that the wolf that the Principality of Asturias plans to kill in its slope of the Picos de Europa National Park should not be hunted. The Ministry of Ecological Transition has issued an unfavorable report to which elDiario.es has had access, which concludes that it cannot be certified that “the extraction of wolf specimens requested is neutral on the conservation status of the species in Spain.”

The European Commission supports the Government in protecting the wolf against the rejection of some communities

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The Executive of the Principality intends to bring down a wolf from the pack that lives in the Cabrales-Tresviso area due to, it claims, the damage it causes to livestock. In order to kill a specimen, it is necessary to justify the reasons that support not complying with the new legal protection of the species that prevents it from being hunted in a generalized way, even north of the Duero river. And have a mandatory report, although not binding, from the Government.

The Ecological Transition analysis explains that the Asturian authorities have accredited that livestock farms have applied “preventive or livestock protection measures” so there would be no alternatives. Also that the damages are recurrent or significant.

But, the document continues, more information is needed regarding that population from which an individual is to be “extracted”: the mortality rate, productivity rates, size of the family group in different phases of the life cycle. Also “the census of the total number of wolves or groups detected both in the Community and in the area in which it is proposed to carry out the extraction, in the surroundings of the Picos de Europa National Park”.

Without this requirement, “it is difficult to assume that the requested extraction would not entail a significant change that could affect the conservation status of the species” both locally and nationally. And this point breaches a of the requirements of the regulations to admit the hunting of wolvesinsists the report.

Asturias states in its resolution that, despite having killed an average of eight wolves a year -before protection- “which corresponds to 20% of the population”, there has been “no decline in the population […] which shows that they have a great recovery capacity and a great resistance to extractions”.

The Principality was waiting for this report to be able to deal with an explicit extraction authorization, that is, to hunt the animal. “The Asturian government can go ahead with that plan, but this report gives us more arguments to appeal to the courts, so they are at greater risk,” says Theo Oberhuber, from Ecologistas en Acción, an organization opposed to managing the species through hunting.

Oberhuber considers that the Asturian plan, “does not conform to what the regulations foresee, since it is a kind of authorization of preventive death when what the rule says is that it is necessary to identify which specimen causes the damage in order to kill it. It is a legally slippery path.”

The Principality understands that the extraction is justified by “the evolution of damage to livestock in the specific Asturian area of ​​the Picos de Europa National Park” both in 2021 and so far in 2022 and because “all the previous steps required” by the new regulations.



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