2023-08-23 08:35:00
At nightfall, agents from the French Office for Biodiversity (OFB), armed with firecrackers and rubber bullets, scan the mountains to protect the herds from possible attacks by brown bears roaming freely in the Pyrenees.
“We are here to defend the herd, not to harm the bear”, underlines one of the officers in charge of these shots intended to scare away, if necessary, this imposing mammal, which can measure up to 2, 10 m and weigh 250 kg.
After two hours of walking, from Lake Bethmale in Ariège, three of them set up camp in the mountain pastures of a pastoral group of around 2,000 sheep.
For two nights, they take turns at an altitude of 1,980 m to watch over the animals.
“Our objective is to fire a double detonation cartridge (a sort of firecracker) when a bear goes into the attack phase on the herd”, explains an agent, placing her bag and rifle at the foot of her tent.
The rubber bullets are reserved “in case we get attacked”, she adds, adding that she never had to use them.
support the shepherds
Making his way among the sheep, the shepherd Zoïs Michel, 20, comes to meet the OFB team, who requested anonymity. “It’s been three weeks since I asked for scaring,” he explains to AFP, stick under his arm.
“When the sheep are sleeping near the hut, I am on the lookout. If there is something, I come out”. This night, thanks to the OFB “I can let go”, he explains.
Despite three shepherds, nine dogs and two electrified enclosures, where livestock can be parked at night, this mountain pasture has suffered 32 bear attacks since June, according to the prefecture of Ariège, which on August 10 counted a total of 265 in the Department.
The OFB counted 331 bear attacks on livestock in the Pyrenees in 2022, compared to 333 the previous year.
“We have the job of scaring, but we are also a moral support for the shepherds because it is a complicated situation”, adds one of the agents of the OFB.
Breeder, François Thibaut is worried about his shepherds.
“He is an employee who is there to keep the sheep during the day. So if in addition he has to stay up all night, that poses problems”, specifies this 41-year-old man, in charge of the bear file at the agricultural union of the Confederation. peasant.
Predation is “very difficult to live with, these are violent situations and traumas”, he adds.
On its mountain pasture, scaring shots were banned by the administrative court of Toulouse.
“We are disappointed with these court decisions,” he said, saying that if these shots are entrusted “to sworn agents, it is so that the bear does not risk anything”.
Disputed shots
But conservationists disagree.
Once present everywhere in France, the brown bear has seen its population decrease due to hunting and the destruction of its habitat by human activity.
In 1995, there were only five left in the Pyrenees. An introductory program was then launched. Since then, the population has grown and the OFB counted 76 bears last year.
“We want peace for the bears, that they be left alone”, declares Jessica Lefèvre-Grave, director of external relations and investigations at One Voice, an association which suspended five scaring orders in Ariège this year.
It is difficult to measure the impact of shooting on the health of plantigrades, according to Christian Arthur, scientific manager at the Pyrenees National Park for 25 years, in charge in particular of bears.
“Do these shots have auditory consequences on the bears? (…) By dint of repeated scaring shots on mountain pastures, do we change behavior, especially females with young? don’t know,” he admits.
For environmental geographer Farid Benhammou, who has been studying bears in the Pyrenees since 1998, “this recourse to violence is much too rapid in relation to its real effectiveness”.
“I alert the public authorities: to give in too easily to scare shots is to go down a slippery slope which could lead to trivializing fatal bear shots”, he says.
08/23/2023 08:34:17 – Bethmale (France) (AFP) – © 2023 AFP
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