Spain's Bears don't cry Wolf
an interview with Juan Carlos Blanco

Spain’s wilderness still provides a refuge for large predators such as the Brown bear and the wolf, species which have all but disappeared in most of Europe. Juan Carlos Blanco is a doctor in Biology and one of the founding members of the Brown Bear Foundation, one of Spain’s most progressive private conservation bodies. As well as being concerned about bears he is an authority on the Iberian wolf which is the subject of one of his books and a number of his scientific papers. In this 1995 interview by Damian Martin, Juan Carlos Blanco clears up some of the myths surrounding wolf and bear conservation in Spain. Although population figures have been updated in recent years the main conservation issues remain  true today.
 

What is the current status of Spain’s bear and wolf populations?

Bears are in danger of becoming extinct. The current population is very small - There are maybe 80 bears left in all of Spain and their numbers are decreasing. There are two areas were you can still find bears: In the Cordillera Cantábrica, specially in the province of Asturias, and also in León, Palencia and, more marginally, in Cantabria and Lugo. There are also bears in the Spanish Pyrenees but these number one or two at the most and will probably become extinct very soon. That is the situation today concerning bears. The wolf however is faring better. Wolves may be found in one fifth of the total area of the Spanish mainland, particularly in the North-western quarter, that is to say in Galicia, Asturias, part of Cantabria and particularly in Castilla-León. We estimated there were some 2,000 wolves in Spain in 1988 and it is considered to be a growing population. It is certainly the most important wolf population in Western Europe. Outside of Spain there only more European wolves in Romania and in Russia.

So you consider that bears in the Spanish Pyrenees will definitely  become extinct?

We actually consider them technically extinct already. These bears have not bred for many years and they are known as “walking dead”, that is to say we no longer have a population to talk about, only the remaining individuals of a process of extinction. In the Cordillera Cantábrica bears are disappearing rapidly but in this case it may  still be possible to halt extinction.

How do you see the future for the wolf in Spain?

Not bad really. Wolf numbers have grown considerably in Spain in the last 20 years to the point where from a situation in the seventies when it was on the border of extinction, it has recovered most of its original area of distribution, and, as I said earlier, it has one of the highest populations in Europe. There are, it is true, some problems but we do not predict it will  be in danger of extinction again.

What are the reasons for the increase in wolf numbers?

There are two main reasons. One is the new conservation consciousness of the public. In the seventies the wolf was “officially” a persecuted species. The government paid bounties for wolves killed and distributed strychnine poison to peasants and land-owners. In those days this was considered a correct policy. Now people see wolves in a different light.  Wolves cause a lot of damage: They are a very conflictive species. Wherever there are wolves there is conflict. Therefore the attitude of the public towards the wolf is crucial to its survival. If people are prepared to put up with this damage to the point of paying compensations or to decide that the damage caused is not serious enough to warrant wolf eradication then there will be wolves. If, however, people believe, as they did thirty years ago, that wolves are a scourge, a vestige of the past, then wolves have to  go. Don’t forget that until fairly recently it was thought of as a “third world” characteristic to have wolves in your country - “Civilised” nations like Great Britain, France or Germany had already got rid of their wolves! That is, therefore, one of the reasons why wolves are on the increase, not only in Spain but worldwide. The other reason, specially in Northern Spain, is that in the last 20 or 30 years, there has been a migration of people from the country to the towns. The fact that a lot of the countryside has been left devoid of people has also been beneficial to the wolf population. Vegetation in areas previously devoted to agriculture has come back and numbers of prey species, specially roe deer and wild boar have increased a lot in this period.

So you would not really class the wolf as an endangered species?

Well, it is considered vulnerable. It is a species we have to take great care of. The fact that we have some 2,000 wolves is really not that large a number. In any case all large carnivores are rare by nature and they require special attention.

To go back to bears, what would you say are the main threats it is faced with today in Spain?

Look, a lot of people say to themselves: If wolves are on the increase, why are bears becoming rarer? The two species have different life strategies. Wolves have a high reproductive potential. They can breed at one year of age and the average number of pups is five, although if population density is low and there is abundance of food they can have give birth to up to ten young. It is also a great opportunist: It can eat almost anything and live almost anywhere. Really its biggest problem is the harm it causes to humans. Bears have a very different vital strategy. They do not really have natural enemies. Their reproductive rate is very low. It is a specialist species which must live in a given habitat, feeding on particular types of food, at least as far as Spanish bears are concerned. They are fairly incompatible with humans and the cannot inhabit populated areas. Therefore although wolves have found the means to boost their numbers given the smaller human persecution and their own capacity overcome adverse conditions, bears have not been able to keep their population up. The decline of the Spanish bear in the last decades has been, I think, definitive. It has reached a situation where increases in numbers are very slow and it is extremely vulnerable to poaching, even if only a few animals are affected: More animals are killed than can be replaced. Also the fact that roads are built and that their habitat is changed affects bears tremendously. Wolves can cope with all these situations with much greater ease.

What are the current legal protections for bears and wolves in Spain?

Bears have the highest possible grade of protection. European directives dictate that bear habitat must also be strictly protected. Bears are considered a priority conservation species. There are only  two or three other species in Spain which have the same degree of legal protection, for example the Iberian lynx or the Monk seal.  As well as the hunting of bears being strictly forbidden, the areas they inhabit all have some degree of protection in the form of natural parks or similar bodies. The European Union has assigned large sums of money to bear conservation. Cantabrian bears have been awarded a sum of one thousand million pesetas towards their protection, to be spent over two or three years. That is a lot of money although it has to be said that a large portion has been miss-spent. Also a sum of some three or four hundred million has been assigned to  bear conservation in the Pyrenees - That is quite a few million per head! Wolves, on the other hand, are classed as game species. This is to say that wolves may be hunted during the shooting season dictated by each Comunidad Autónoma. Some Comunidades Autónomas do, in fact, implement measures to resolve some of the wolves´ problems but always as a game species. Therefore the degree of protection of wolves is far below that of bears.

Environmentalists outside Spain have often been critical of the Spanish Government for allowing the wolf to remain as a species which may be legally hunted. What is your opinion?

Well...In general terms I think there should be legal means to allow wolves to be controlled. However I would like the wolf  to be in a different category to general game species, that is to say in a different bag from animals such as, say, rabbits. I would like to see it as a species which can be hunted but which has specific measures for the protection of its habitat. Anyway I do think that wolves can be hunted without it necessarily affecting their population. There are no scientific grounds for prohibiting wolf hunting. There may be emotional motives - I could say I do not like wolves to be hunted but there are no scientific arguments to back this.

Is it possible that the very fact that wolves can be hunted actually aids their conservation?

A well-known Spanish biologist, Miguel Delibes, son of the writer, always says that the wolf’s main enemy is the wolf. This is very true. Wolves cause considerable damage to cattle and bring upon themselves a lot of adverse passion. You  really have to go out into the countryside to find out just to what extent some of the local people are against wolves. I believe it is necessary that measures exist so that this hatred can be limited and, in some cases, so that particularly harmful populations may be controlled.

You are a member of the Brown Bear Foundation which has as its main concerns the protection of bears and also of wolves in Spain. Can you tell us more about the Foundation?

Yes, the Fundación Oso Pardo is a group formed by professionals who are dedicated to the study and conservation of wildlife. Most of them are based at the universities of Oviedo and Cantabria. The organisation was created to complement the activities of the Government towards conservation of bears in Spain. In other European countries with a longer democratic tradition, such as Great Britain, the weight of conservation plans fall mainly upon non-government organisations. For example the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds has nearly a million members and a huge annual budget which is far greater than, say, that of the British Joint Nature Conservancy. In Spain the opposite is true. In other words nearly all conservation measures are in the hands of Government authorities. We believe that Spain should have a conservation model closer to that found in other European countries in which private organisations collaborate and complement the work of the Government. This makes up for some of the deficiencies inherent to Government implemented measures such as dependency on political power and excessive red-tape. In general private groups channel funds in a more efficient manner. This was the objective with which the foundation was created. Recently, the European Union has awarded the foundation one hundred thousand pesetas via the LIFE programme and we are working very closely with the different authorities to achieve our aims.

What specific measures has the Fundación Oso Pardo taken to achieve its objectives?

Well... concerning bears we have several programmes running in parallel. Proyecto Huella (Project Footprint) is a scheme intended for children which is implemented by education specialists. We run courses in schools throughout the bear´s area of distribution, that is to say in Asturias, Cantabria, northern Castilla León and Galicia. Then we have a habitat conservation programme, Proyecto Habitat, which includes buying land which belongs to the villages by a special local purchase mode known as regimen proindiviso whereby you can actually influence the use of the land by buying a relatively small participation. Therefore with a modest investment you have the right to block any activity which would cause considerable changes of land use in that particular estate. Finally we have our most ambitious scheme, and also the one I like best, which we call Proyecto Caza y Oso (Project Hunting and Bears) in which we actually collaborate with hunters so that they can hunt game species, not bears of course, in a way that is compatible with bear conservation. We have reached the conclusion that the old policies which are still being implemented in some areas where hunting is totally banned in bear habitat is, in some cases, very dangerous. What you are doing is antagonising the local population against bears. The people in these villages say to themselves: “OK we have bears here so they are going to stop us from hunting and carrying out other activities so the best thing for us is that there are no bears”. What we want to do is to make bear conservation compatible with traditional human activities, including hunting. This is something that in some bear habitats in the Cordillera Cantábrica is a fairly emotional subject. I think in some of these villages people live to hunt: If they couldn’t hunt they would commit suicide! (laughter) They don’t really have many other pass-times. We have rented the hunting rights in some of the more conflictive mining areas of northern León where several bears have been killed by poachers in recent years. We work together with local authorities and with hunting associations, amongst them the Spanish Hunting Federation which has over five hundred thousand members - This is more than any other private organisation in Spain, including political parties!.  What we actually do is to provide wardens and technical support and we hand the hunting rights over to the local hunters in exchange for a commitment not to hunt illegally or to use hunting methods which are dangerous to the bears. This our most complex project and one which some of environmentalists treat with suspicion.

For sentimental reasons?

Yes some people don’t seem to like anything that is related to gunpowder! However we believe it is the only way to protect bears in some of these areas.

Would you say, then, that protection of wolves by the Fundación Oso Pardo is incidental to work carried out primarily for the benefit of bears?

No, not really. Wolves are not really in need of specific conservation measures in most of their range in Spain. However there is one new problem which has arisen in recent years which could affect wolves adversely and that is concerning highways and motorways. European funds have been given to the Spanish government for the construction of over five thousand kilometres of fenced-off dual carriage-ways. This causes a fragmentation of the wolf’s area of distribution. Most of these new roads are being built in areas of depressed economy which enables them access to special European Union funds known as FEDER grants. It is precisely in these areas where most of Spain’s current wolf population lives. This fragmentation of the wolf’s habitat could be very detrimental to the wolf population in general. Hunting, as we have said, does not really affect wolf numbers as the recovery rate is very rapid. However, if we fragment its habitat, then numbers could drop in the long term almost without us noticing it. There is a project run by several members of the foundation where we will work closely with Government authorities, including the Ministry for Public Works, the MOPTMA, so that special passages are built for wildlife under the new highways. In this way the ecological corridors linking populations together would remain open. This new project has a research side - we have to find out exactly where these natural corridors are - and a conservation angle were we will endeavour to coax the Government bodies into maintaining and protecting these passages. In general our motto is not to oppose development or human activity (for example by  being critical of the construction of new roads or by blocking hunts) but to actively research the technical means for making activities like road construction or  hunting compatible with conservation.

Finally, how can the public help you in your endeavours to protect bears and wolves in Spain?

There are two main ways in which people can help. One is to work as a volunteer with the wardens in one of the hunting reserves which I mentioned earlier, although at the moment this is rather over-subscribed. The other way in which people can support us, and this is perhaps even more important, is to donate funds towards our work. Funds can be donated either towards the general activities of the Foundation or specifically to any one of our projects. We understand that some donors do not want to subsidise the purchase of land but are quite interested in our education schemes, or viceversa. In the same way some supporters do not want to be involved in our hunting programme but approve of all the others. To cater for any of these special wishes we provide an “a la carte” menu of support, all of which is most welcome.

Thank you very much for your time.