Madrid, Apr 4 (EFE).- The Deputy Secretary for Regional and Local Coordination of the Popular Party, Pedro Rollán, proposes removing the Iberian wolf from the List of Wild Species under Special Protection Regime (Lespre) to recover the “balance” between these canids and the ranchers, who are the ones “in danger of extinction”.
This was stated on Tuesday by the PP senator, who in a conference organized in the Upper House to address the relationship between farmers and wolves, has advocated handing over the Iberian wolf management competence to the autonomous communities, which will be able to decide how deal with the “overpopulation” of the animal.
Rollán has lamented the situation of “extreme vulnerability” that in his opinion the ranchers of this country live, “desolate” every time there are attacks by wolves on their cattle – between 8,000 and 10,000 incidents “year in and year out” ”, has assured the senator- and for the conditions added to their farms, such as nervousness that harms pregnant or lactating females, he has pointed out.
These farmers, who according to the deputy secretary of the PP are the ones who “are in danger of extinction”, have suffered the consequences of the “imbalance” that for Rollán the national wolf protection policy has caused after it was included in September 2021 animal in the Lespre in a “unilateral” way, he has criticized.
“Faced with a Europe in which every day there is a deeper reflection on how to order the relationship between humans, livestock, and the wolf”, the senator warns that currently in Spain “the well-being of the wolf prevails”.
And so, “in this rural Spain of which we can feel absolutely proud, every day there are more farmers who have it, frankly, very difficult to be able to continue with their livestock farms,” he alleged, because of the attacks.
The politician has accused the Government of sending data to the high European institutions “to justify the incorporation of the wolf to the Lespre” that are not a reflection of the reality that “is currently taking place in Spain.”
The number of packs is increasing, Rollán stressed, and “they are increasingly in more territories, in which the presence of the wolf had not existed for decades.”
From the PP, the senator has defended “the custody and protection of the wolf, but not at any price”, and has highlighted the need to protect livestock and the generational replacement in this “millennial” activity as a way of fixing the population at the same time. territory.
The Strategy for the management and conservation of the wolf and its coexistence with the activities of the rural environment, approved last year, underlines the difficulty in estimating the evaluation in the wolf populations in Spain, given the difference between the methodologies used to census the packs in different periods.
It also maintains that “among the causes of unnatural mortality of this species, outrages and direct persecution stand out especially”, with methods such as poisoning, which “constitutes a serious threat not only for the wolf, but also for other threatened species and for the rest of the biodiversity”.
