The Civil Guard is looking for those responsible for the deaths of two wolves that were found shot, decapitated and skinned on Wednesday, December 20, in the Lois area of León, in the municipality of Los Crémenes. The focus of the investigation is a wild boar hunt that took place on Sunday, December 17th in a private hunting reserve. The macabre discovery came after the regional government of Castile and León informed officers of the Civil Guard's Nature Conservation Service (Seprona) of suspicions that several wolves had been shot in Lois. The agents discovered traces of blood on the ground, and when they followed the trail, they found the bodies of the Canids. The species is protected in Spain and its hunting has been banned since September 2021. The criminals had cut off their heads, a common hunting trophy, and torn off their skin, a rarer occurrence.
In addition to Seprona's environmental officers, environmentalists and skilled workers from the regional environmental area corresponding to the Riaño Forest Region and the Riaño Regional Hunting Reserve participated in the operation. The authority has detailed that it is collecting the necessary information about this poaching episode as it is a criminal offense under the Penal Code. The Environment Ministry of the Government of Castile and León states that the two specimens were “tied together by the same rope.”
Sources from the Conservation Service of the Guardia Civil (Seprona) in León indicate that these places represent “a privileged area for hunters” since they are located in the northwest of the province between the Riaño and Mampodre nature reserves, with the Picos de Europa behind him. They are two natural areas of great ecological value, in which there are large numbers of deer, roe deer and wild boar that attract hunters, in addition to frequent packs of wolves, the latter of which are prohibited from hunting after being included in the list of game species belonging to one subject to special protection regimes. The highest density of the estimated 2,000 to 2,500 wolves living in Spain is found in Castile and León, followed by Galicia, Asturias and Cantabria.
“There are even bears there,” emphasizes this informant. The investigation is ongoing and this source is optimistic about finding the person who shot the two wolves. She is almost certainly present among the participants in this raid on Sunday December 17th, without ruling out that there could be another injured or dead person nearby and was not seen during the search of the premises. “We sent the bodies to the Wild Animal Recovery Center to find out the trajectory of the bullets, perform the autopsy and learn a little more about the cause of death,” explains the Seprona member, praising the cooperation between the units. As soon as they received “a communication and some rumors” about what allegedly happened in this raid, they immediately mobilized to investigate the incident and begin field work.
The controversy over the complete protection of the wolf is becoming more and more polarizing and is leading to incidents of this kind in Spain. Sometimes poachers freeze the heads of wolves to use them as a mafia protest against the ban on hunting. On Tuesday December 19, just as they were looking for the specimens found dead in León, the head and tail of an Iberian wolf appeared on a rope on the Senda Bridge in the city of Villanueva (Asturias). . In May of this year, some workers in the Principality also found two wolf heads on the stairs to the town hall.
In Europe, the debate about the situation of the wolf has come to the fore, with an estimated population of 20,300 canids in Member States. The European Commission proposed on Wednesday December 20 to convert the species from “strictly protected”, a current category that only allows the killing of individuals in certain circumstances, to “protected”, which requires the authorization of their hunting was any other species. A different species of game. Environmental associations sharply criticized these plans, which are based on political criteria in view of the upcoming European Parliament elections. For the proposal to be implemented, it must first be approved in the Berne Convention on the conservation of wild fauna, flora and natural habitats in Europe, which does not meet for another year, and then the Habitats Directive must be amended, which requires unanimity which requires twenty-seven.
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