A radiant first victory for One Voice for the Pyrenean Brown Bears!
One Voice has obtained an urgent suspension of the Ariège Prefect’s decree authorising the scaring of brown bears on the summer pastures in Ustou Col d’Escots. The hearing for the six others will take place at the Toulouse Administrative Tribunal on 8 August.
Victory for brown bears! The Ariège Prefect’s order of 22 June 2022 authorising simple bear scaring and scaring by non-lethal shooting during the 2022 season in the summer pastures by the shepherding group Ustou Col d’Escots has been suspended. The hearing for the six other summer pastures concerned will also take place at the Toulouse Administrative Tribunal on 8 August.
Yes, this is a radiant victory!
Because we have chosen audacity, to attack the emergency interim prefectural decree, and also to try to get the one that has in the past been attacked in substance urgently suspended. It is a first. And it has proven to have paid off for the bears!
Because when we attack an annulment decree (in substance), it can be cancelled or not, but the decision always takes place afterwards, after the order concerned has been enacted. An interim suspension order, on the other hand, allows the course of the decree to be urgently interrupted, if the judge deems there to be a good reason to put a stop to it.
Our strategy was to allow the bears some peace…
… not to suffer from bear scaring, particularly by means of sound grenades and rubber bullets (in other words, methods that are non-lethal but even so are very aggressive). These animals are protected by French and European laws, however.
By definition, there are few bears in the Pyrenees. And without supporting the ‘reintroduction’ process (capturing wild bears from Slovenia, uprooting, transporting, and releasing them in unknown surroundings), we take issue with this scaring which frightens them, can hurt them, and does not allow the pregnant females to carry their pregnancies to term.
These are not methods adapted to properly protect the few ursine individuals that inhabit our Pyrenean mountains. There are well under one hundred; their population is very much below the threshold of viability for the species. Their predation (weak; brown bears, feed mainly on vegetation remember) is far from being at the level of the measures implemented against them! It would be better to make natural spaces a sanctuary.
Hedged mountain pastures: six left to defend. This will be on 8 August
We have also appealed for interim measures for all of the other orders released by the Ariège Prefecture on this subject, which are no different from the first other than the geographical area which they relate to.
This initial victory allows us hope for the hearing set for 8 August, once again at the Toulouse Administrative Tribunal, which will concern the six mountain pastures targeted by the prefecture: those from the farming groups of Taus-Espugues, Arreau, Coumebière, Sentenac d’Oust, Izard, and finally Ourdouas.
The State Council has already cancelled the ministerial decrees of 2019 and 2020, allowing prefects to put decrees in place like the one that we just got the immediate suspension for. We have launched concurrent proceedings to get the one of 20 June 2022 cancelled and are awaiting a date in the months to come.
Translated from the French by Joely Justice