An 81-year-old hunter in France has been fined and handed a four-month suspended jail sentence for killing an endangered bear within the Pyrenees mountains.
The person mentioned he had “no different possibility” however to open fireplace on the brown bear when it attacked him throughout a boar-hunt in 2021.
Fifteen different hunters had been additionally fined and should collectively pay greater than €60,000 (£51,000) in damages to environmental associations that had filed a civil swimsuit in opposition to them.
The 150kg feminine bear, nicknamed Caramelles, has since been preserved by a taxidermist and is on show on the Toulouse Pure Historical past Museum.
The Foix Legal Court docket heard that the group had been boar-hunting within the Pyrenees, the mountain vary that separates southern France and Spain, when two bear cubs emerged.
Shortly afterwards their mom appeared, charging on the man and dragging him a number of metres, earlier than he shot and killed the animal.
“She grabbed my left thigh, I panicked and fired a shot. She backed away growling, she went round me and bit my proper calf, I fell, she was consuming my leg,” he informed the court docket.
“I reloaded my rifle and fired.”
The taking pictures occurred within the Mont Valier nature reserve close to the village of Seix, Ariège. Prosecutors mentioned they need to not have been there within the first place, as a result of it was 1,300ft (396m) exterior an authorised searching space.
However the defence lawyer for 14 of the hunters, Fanny Campagne, criticised “the shortage of indicators indicating that searching was prohibited”.
The shooter was fined €750, his rifle has been confiscated and his searching licence revoked.
In an announcement, bear-preservation affiliation Pays de l’ours mentioned the decision “appears justified”.
“All of the hunters had been discovered responsible, which is crucial factor for us,” the affiliation’s president, Sabine Matraire, was quoted as saying in Le Monde.
“We hope that this ruling might be adopted by a elevating of consciousness among the many searching neighborhood,” she added.
Brown bear populations noticed a pointy decline within the Pyrenees, with solely about 70 left in 1954, according to the region’s tourism board.
However numbers have slowly climbed up since Nineties when three bears had been introduced over from Slovenia as a part of a reintroduction programme.
In 2024, the French Office for Biodiversity estimated that the mountain vary is now residence to about 96 bears.
