“On June 19, a bear was discovered in a canyon. An investigation was entrusted to the French Office for Biodiversity (OFB). The autopsy clearly ruled out any human intervention,” said the public prosecutor of Saint-Gaudens, Christophe Amunzateguy.
A young bear was found dead in a rugged area of the Pyrenees, announced Tuesday the parquet floor of Saint-Gaudens, in Haute-Garonne, which favors the thesis of a confrontation with another animal. “On June 19, a bear was discovered in a canyon. An investigation was entrusted to the French Office for Biodiversity (OFB). The autopsy clearly ruled out any human intervention,” said the public prosecutor of Saint-Gaudens, Christophe Amunzateguy. The legal expertise, according to the prosecutor, “established that the death of this one and a half year old animal was certainly the result of a confrontation with another bear or another animal”.
OFB officers found the bear near the village of Melles, where in the 1990s the first releases of Slovenian brown bears took place. In 2020 and 2021, four bears were illegally killed by humans in the Pyrenees. One was poisoned in Spain, the other three were shot. The program to reintroduce the bear, which had practically disappeared from this mountain range, has made it possible to consolidate the presence of the plantigrade. Today, they are around 70, especially in the center of the Pyrenees, in Ariège on the French side, in the Val d’Aran on the Spanish side, according to the French authorities.
Non-lethal shots in question
The predations of the bear on the herds of sheep in the mountain pastures are denounced by the breeders and the anti-bears, who oppose its presence. Bear scaring measures including non-lethal shots, implemented in France in 2019 to protect herds, have been renewed for the government. According to the Ministries of Ecological Transition and Agriculture, these measures have had “a certain effectiveness in terms of avoiding predation”.
On derogation from the prefecture, breeders can resort to simple scaring (sound, olfactory and light means) or “reinforced” with non-lethal shots (double detonation cartridges or rubber bullets), if the first measures are not enough. These non-lethal shots are regularly denounced by bear defense associations, which have also won their appeals several times before the Council of State.