Let's save the ibex of Haute-Savoie!
Ibex like to roam over the rocky ridges, 3000 meters above sea level without the slightest dizziness. One Voice is fighting for their survival in our mountains.
Ibex with long fluted horns like to roam over the rocky ridges, 3000 meters above sea level. From above, they can scan the vast landscape and spot predators. It’s crazy, these goats play on the steepest slopes, leaping from one ledge to another without the slightest dizziness. One Voice is fighting for their survival.
This is because the ibex knows his mountain well. He has lived there for so long! Our ancestors already painted his image by torchlight in the Lascaux cave. Under the pressure from crossbows and firearms, they almost disappeared in the 19th century. They were reintroduced in Italy in 1922, then in the French Alps in 1970 where nearly 3000 ibex live today. Prohibited to be hunted and protected by the Bern Convention on endangered species, the ibex of Bargy should be able to live happily.
Yet, for commercial pretexts and so-called sanitary, they are since 2013 the target of prefectural requests ordering their slaughter. It has been hypothesized that ibexes may have played a role in the contamination of the Reblochon cheese, although they do not frequent the same places as cows, and transmission of contaminants is complex or unlikely.
It is their eradication which is consciously organized. But the pretext of this killing, a zoonosis, some ibex are carriers, only fuels the fear. Shooting, on the other hand, does not solve the problem, on the contrary. The risk is great of a spread to other mountain ranges by the dispersion of the few animals that have escaped the shooters.
These killings are all the more useless as there are alternative solutions, such as euthanasia of only sick animals, which can suffer from severe arthritis, and vaccination with a follow-up of healthy animals. But no, as always, Nature is seen as a means of profit, the only one that is worth it. Shoot, regulate … for the comfort and benefit of some humans. It is time for this to stop. Wildlife, here and elsewhere, is worth so much more.
With its partners, in August 2018, One Voice made a new appeal against the prefectural decree of ibex slaughter to demand its cancellation, and we will sue all the orders that are planned to kill these majestic inhabitants of the mountain!