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Lupus est homo homini, non homo, quom qualis sit non novit
A man is a wolf rather than a man to another man, when he hasn’t yet found out what he’s like
Plautus (254-184 b. C.)
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The wolf is coming, the wolf is coming!
I have never been very fond of fables, children’s stories and fatuous literature. I’ve always been more into adventures, stories. Real stories, of course. Mainly the hidden and forgotten ones, difficult and uncomfortable to digest. Those that always flow against the current. In the opposite direction to fashion, trends and political correctness…
And by chance, here I am. More than a year kidnapped by the stupidity and a pandemic that stopped my adventures across the seas.
And suddenly, I guess also by chance and the usual large dose of curiosity, the hitherto alien landscape of the mountains appeared before my eyes… Immaculate, infinite. And with it, its people. With their joys and sorrows.
And in the midst of it all, always present… the wolf. Loved and hated in equal parts.
Twenty-seven hundred of them run free in the Iberian Peninsula, according to the last census carried out in 2014, in 297 herds scattered mainly in the four regions that are home to 98% of the country’s specimens: Galicia, Castilla y León, Asturias and Cantabria.
During the last three decades, the number of specimens, according to the central government, has barely increased in Spain. However, in communities such as Cantabria, it is estimated that its population has increased sixfold following a clear process of geographical expansion and is already present in almost three quarters of its territory.
On September 25, the Ministry for Ecological Transition and the Demographic Challenge (MITECO) included the Iberian wolf (Canis lupus signatus) in the List of Wildlife Species under Special Protection Regime (LESPRE), which means that this canid, which before the year 2000 was considered vermin, cannot be hunted in the national territory, thus reactivating a conflict that seems to have no end.
While this battle of figures and political interests goes on in the offices, the increase in wolf attacks has the rural people on edge, who feel helpless and abandoned in the face of hostilities that are intensifying, unleashing a new civil war in the mountains. Most cattle ranchers are no longer compensated for so much anxiety. Every night they have to go up into the mountains to watch over and protect their livestock, sleeping in their vehicles or in one of the precarious huts scattered on the summits. Entire families come early to look for their calving cattle in the mountain passes, where they feed in the rich pastures, to bring them down to enclosures at lower altitudes in order to at least be able to locate and recover the victims after a new attack.
Nor is it economically viable for them to keep on losing so much. Many mornings they have to count the casualties caused in the last skirmish. In most cases, government aid and its bureaucracy do not cover the damages to the economy. It takes between six and nine months (in some cases even longer) to collect the compensation, and only for the recovered and registered animals. If an animal body is nowhere to be found, its compensation is not collected. And there are many that never appear. As if it were a scary movie, abducted by supposed predators of the summits, leaving no trace…
This economic uncertainty is making way for a much more complicated issue to diagnose and overcome: mental insecurity. Disillusionment, anguish and stress are surfacing in a world where day-to-day concerns were other. All this is forming a very dangerous cocktail, with clear evidence: the wolf is getting closer and closer, and its attacks are already prowling the courtyards of their homes. The statistics are overwhelming: eighty-five percent of the «damages» (a curious metaphor for the animals killed) are caused less than a hundred meters from the houses. It’s estimated that 15,000 heads of cattle are «killed» in the peninsula each year (720 attacks registered according to the regional government with more than 1,200 victims recovered during the last nine months only in Cantabria), so they demand actions to prevent the indiscriminate killing of their herds.
But the war goes on. And it looks like it will stay that way… Too many interests involved. As always. As for almost everything.
With apparently well-defined sides that vehemently defend their positions within a strange ring of four perfectly protected corners. Most of the time, obviating the arguments and the vision of the other. The logic.
On one hand, the conservationist organizations always assuring the primordial protection and safeguarding of the wolf to maintain the good health of the ecosystem and proposing to speed up the in many cases scarce subsidies per killed animal, to try to palliate somehow the economic impact to the families of the mountain.
On the other hand, the ranchers, who curiously advocate the same thing, since they do not want mountains without canids. They have always lived with them and wish to continue to do so. But they want their cattle. Alive. They’re part of the family. Logically, they don’t think it’s fair to always have to be the real benefactors of the «pardo» that they feed every day with their cattle.
And in between, a public opinion that isn’t aware of both sides of the story. I believe that a problem has several edges that must be evaluated. Each and every one. The truth, sometimes, is relative… And a political class more concerned about not getting blood on their hands, in an attempt to avoid getting called out on it eventually. It seems complicated, even dangerous in a way, to raise certain flags in public… So there they are, the autonomous and central governments engaged in a contest of terrible consequences in which the victims, unfortunately, it seems like they will continue to be the same they’ve always been.
And the wolf keeps dying. By action or omission. By civil or military action.
The primary sector, along with the extensive livestock sector too. And nobody seems to care. Our villages orphaned. Their fields in permanent fallow. Strange Spain, emptied out, immersed in a ridiculous and misunderstood globalization of free opinion lovers, censorship and buddyship…
And here they are. The last of the Philippines. Anonymous heroes of a few generations that with their sacrifice always filled our table with rich food without asking much in return, and now, they are hopelessly extinct forgotten, before our disdain from any capital city. Faces eroded by hard work and marathon days of life. Furrows and more furrows. Mountains and more mountains… here is my gratitude and small tribute to them.
I have always been a firm believer in the unwritten and inalienable right that all those killed in a conflict should hold the same value. On one side or the other. Hopefully one day that will happen here! Unfortunately, I also believe that man and wolf have never been so close on the immaculate and infinite mountains and green valleys of our beloved Cantabria. And at the same time, they’ve never been so far away…
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