Posted on 07/28/2011 11:07:33 AM PDT by decimon
A bloody, stinking sheep's carcass greets shepherd Yves Vignon as he walks to check on his flock on the foggy Alpine heights. It's the 17th of his ewes to be savaged in a month.
The mountains over Grenoble were once an ideal grazing ground for his 900 sheep. But now, after long banishment, the wolves are back -- bolder and hungrier than ever.
"We came to this spot on June 24. A week later we were attacked" by wolves, Vignon, 62, told AFP. It was the first of at least four attacks over the past month.
"Every morning when I get up, I wonder what I am going to find on the spot where the sheep have spent the night," he says. "I'm not here to feed those wolves!"
Wolves were eradicated in France in the 1930s, but made a comeback in the southern Alps in 1992, crossing from Italy. They have spread through eastern France, first to the Savoy and this year to the Vosges and Doubs regions.
The predators have also appeared in the Pyrenees and in the heart of France in the Massif Central mountain range, but the government says these far-flung wolves also originate from the Italian pack.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
Italian double-crossers ping.
Dont tell the animal rights activists.
They previously eradicated wolves in France? That was quite the accomplishment.
“Ravenous wolves colonise France,”
I thought DSK was still in NYC!!
New government forms in Vichy.
I honestly thought the headline was going to be about !zl@m.
France, and Europe, have the same class of emotional, group-think activists as we do in America - ones who believe the wolves are just ‘misunderstood’.
WA state is celebrating the confirmation of its 4th newly established wolf pack 90 miles E. of Seattle.
“We are perfectly aware of the problems encountered by the farmers,” said Green coalition spokesman Pascal Durand. “But we are committed to the coexistence of humans and animals.”
The problem isn’t the wolves, the problem is the people.
The details in that article are sickening, including the photo of the sheep run off the cliff. Horrible.
Wolves, coyotes, Islam - whatever can expand without consequences, will.
Offer $100 per pelt. I bet they’ll be extinct in France, again, in a few years.
Wolves are not misunderstood. They’re competition and need to go.
You’ll need to let people own guns first, and then let ‘em take care of the wolves the old fashioned way.
I hope one of these shepherds successfully sues the wolf-advocate groups and the government for the loss before it’s a person at the bottom of a 60-foot canyon or torn apart. If something the size of a dingo can take a baby...
Hmm, seems like it's the sheep that are at the sharp end of the terror, not the shepherds.
When I was young I worked on a sheep shearing gang in New Zealand. I saw that to be a shepherd the man has to have a heart for sheep.
This is a short quote from a book I’m reading.
“You know, there is a feeling that every shepherd has about a lamb born into his flock, whether he owns the sheep or not. He knows it from the moment of its birth. Although it is twenty-one years since I finished shepherding, I can remember lambs that were born in specific places on that hill of two thousand acres where I shepherded. I could look at a sheep sometimes and remember where it had been born two or three years before. Some of them were born in very rough weather, and when you get a lamb born out on the hills of Argyllshire in that kind of weather you have to do something about it. Sometimes I carried them home in my jacket for five miles and warmed them, and then carried them back five miles. So, you see, you did not forget them very easily.”
There isn’t enough money in the world to salve the grief in that shepherd’s heart for those dead sheep.
Beautiful post.
I’m glad you’re sharing your valuable perspective here. So many of these self-professed advocates for nature are far removed from the realities of the natural world, which includes human, and humane, management of animals, one way or another. I hope some of them are reading this, even if they’re unable to comment here.
Are there no deer in France? Why are the wolves dining solely on shhep?
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