In the past weeks brown bears in the Cantabrian Mountains of Northern Spain increasingly fell victim to poachers. In addition to the economic crisis, it’s mainly machismo that is fuelling the poaching of bears and other wildlife, as shown by documents leaked to EuroNatur from Spain.
One of these documents is a video made by a poacher himself with his mobile. It shows the hunter on his horse ambushing two bears, chasing them through the forest and shooting repeatedly at the terrified, fleeing animals. “Obviously the poacher intended to show off with his alleged ‘heroic deed’”, EuroNatur Executive Director Gabriel Schwaderer supposes.
Through their persistent work, EuroNatur and its partners were able to save the brown bears in the Cantabrian Mountains from extinction. Ranger patrols and a network of camera traps strongly reduced illegal hunting at least in the western part of the Cordillera. “It is a fatal development that poaching is now flaring up in regions, where it had already been successfully eliminated. Every single death of a bear is a severe loss for the still small and endangered population”, Gabriel Schwaderer states.
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