Spain and France call urgent meeting to decide fate of sheep-killing Pyrenees bear

French and Spanish authorities convened on Friday to determine the fate of a sheep-killing bear after furious farmers threatened to take the law into their own hands.

The bear, Claverina, was one of two brown bears airlifted into the French Pyrenees from Slovenia in order to repopulate the region last October. She has since ravaged eight sheep in Spain.

Bears are known for their capacity to travel great distances, and Claverina has spent more time in Spain than in France, attacking and killing eight sheep in Navarre, northern Spain, prompting anger from local farmers.

“We are not going to allow farmers and livestock to face danger from wild species introduced in the area without taking our views into account,” the Navarre Union of Farmers and Livestock Rearers said in a statement last week.

At the meeting between French, Spanish and regional authorities held in Spain’s environment ministry, Navarre’s government was expected to ask for access to geolocation information to follow the bears’ movements in real time.

The local environmental authority is also helping farmers by attaching GPS devices to flocks of sheep, so farmers can be alerted to sudden movements that may indicate the presence of a predatory bear.

In a statement after the summit, Spain’s environment ministry said the parties had agreed to “speed up the exchange of information regarding the tracking of individual bears that move between the Spanish and French Pyrenees”, as well as boosting preventive measures to protect flocks.

Claverina is one of around 40 bears roaming the Pyrenees, while Spain has a 300-strong population in the Cantabrian mountains.

Another Slovenian bear, a male called Goiat, has wrought havoc among flocks of sheep in Catalonia, leading to an agreement between rangers and local authorities to have the animal “re-educated” or removed from the area.

“Bears are no more aggressive than they used to be; the problem is that livestock is not protected,” Guillermo Palomero, the president of Spain’s Brown Bear Foundation, told the newspaper El País, pointing to the successful reintroduction of shelters for shepherds to spend the night with their flocks in the Pyreanean region of Aragon.