Foix – A prosecutor on Wednesday demanded that an 81-year-old French hunter be handed a four-month suspended jail sentence for killing an endangered female bear that had attacked him in the Pyrenees in 2021.
The brown bear is a protected species in the mountain range, which separates France and Spain.
Andre Rives was boar-hunting when a female bear nicknamed Caramelles attacked him.
He has said he had no choice but to open fire.
But the prosecution argued at the trial in Foix in southern France that he and 15 other hunters should not have been in the nature reserve in the first place.
As well as the four-month suspended term for Rives, prosecutor Olivier Mouysset also called for the suspension of hunting licenses and fines against all sixteen hunters who participated in the “unauthorised” hunt in the Mont Valier reserve, in the Ariege region, in November 2021.
Rives “knowingly took the risk of a confrontation with the bear in the reserve, which is an area of calm” for the bear, said the prosecutor, also requesting he be given a two-year ban on carrying a weapon.
‘No other option’
On November 20, 2021, two bear cubs emerged from the woods in front of Rives. Then their mother appeared, charging at the man and dragging him for several metres. He shot and killed the animal.
Rives sustained leg injuries and was in a state of shock. A fellow hunter managed to stem the bleeding before he was evacuated by helicopter.
According to the investigation, the bear was killed 400 metres (1,300 feet) outside an authorised hunting area.
When the cubs emerged, “I looked at them with admiration,” Rives said in court on Tuesday. “I made myself very small. Then the mother saw me. Our eyes met; she charged.”
He said he had no choice but to shoot.
“She grabbed my left thigh; I panicked and fired a shot. She backed away growling, she went around me and bit my right calf, I fell, she was eating my leg,” he added. “I reloaded my rifle and fired.”
Defence lawyer Charles Lagier said all the defendants should be acquitted. Rives “killed a bear because he had no other option; it was necessity. This does not call for criminal charges.”
But Alice Terrasse, the lawyer representing several environmental associations at the trial, called for all 16 hunters to be convicted.
“We want the fault to be acknowledged and compensation for the environmental damage. At the very least, a bear must be reintroduced to compensate for Caramelles’s death,” she said, saying such an operation would cost 100,000 euros ($109,000).
Animal rights activists view bears as integral to maintaining a fragile mountain ecosystem under threat from human activity and climate change.
According to estimates from 2023, there are more than 80 bears currently in the Pyrenees.
Bears had nearly disappeared from the mountain range before France began a reintroduction programme in the 1990s, importing them from Slovenia.
But the presence of bears has led to increasing tensions with farmers because of the threat they pose to their livestock.
The trial adjourned until a verdict on May 6.
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Source: AFP
