The promoters of the introduction of the European bison to the Peninsula have achieved notable success this week. A scientific article that appeared in the journal Biodiversity and Conservation, with the participation of the Autonomous University of Barcelona, supports that the Mediterranean ecosystem is an ideal refuge for the survival of this large herbivore protected in Europe but not in Spain. This support has intensified the dispute between supporters and detractors of the return of this species whose ancestors are portrayed in the caves of Altamira.
But does the protection of the bison in the Iberian Peninsula make sense? Are the measures to promote its conservation in Spain justifiable? The questions are pertinent because the bison disappeared from the Peninsula 12,000 years ago.
However, all this occurs while the plan promoted by naturalists and veterinarians, moved by a true force of passion, is being deployed, and which has already materialized in the arrival in Spain of 171 specimens of European bison.
The animals, brought in recent years from Poland, have been settling in 10 large farms spread across various places on the Peninsula. Supporters and detractors thus participate in a dull debate that has as its backdrop the rewilding of Nature.
The Spanish farms chosen to house these animals have in many cases between 1,000 and 3,000 hectares, areas where European bison live in semi-freedom, although the aspiration of their promoters is that “in the future they will be fully free.”
The European bison (Bison bonasus) was on the verge of disappearing at the beginning of the 20th century, although it was reintroduced into the wild from animals in captivity in the 1950s. Now, subpopulations only remain in Poland, Belarus and Russia, although isolated and confined. And only in 2020 was it no longer considered a threatened animal to be classified as a “near threatened” species, according to the classification of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). There are about 11,000 copies left.
“Spain is the emblematic country of the bison due to the Altamira paintings. We want to contribute to ensuring that this species does not become extinct at the European level. It is help that Europe asks of us. At the same time, he provides us with a tool to control vegetation, avoid fires and keep meat in the bush that serves as carrion…”
These are some of the arguments put forward by Benigno Varillas, popularizer, naturalist, one of the promoters of the plan to recover the European bison. Disciple, biographer of Félix Rodríguez de la Fuente and author of the book collection La estirpe de los libre, Varillas is a great defender of rewilding.
Another key character in this endeavor is the veterinarian Fernando Morán, director of the European Bison Association of Spain, who, in fits and starts, now sees the path clear after having decided to dedicate himself body and soul to this project.
He organized the preparations to welcome the first consignment of animals that arrived from Poland in 2010: seven specimens captured in the Bialowieza forest that were transferred to a zoo in San Cebrià de Mudá (Palencia), where a small space was created ( 17 ha) delimited where they live in semi-freedom.
Moran’s initial intention was to convince the Ministry for the Ecological Transition about the convenience of bringing some 500 specimens to repopulate large abandoned farms in Spain, evaluate their behavior and assess their ability to reduce vegetation and prevent fires.
That did not prosper; But later, thanks to organized mobilization, the number of farms that host the bison has increased to 10. Among them, Encinarejo stands out, 1,000 hectares of Mediterranean forest in the Andújar mountain range, which is home to 18 animals.
The owner of the farm applies a management model here that moves between hunting, ecotourism and promotion to publicize stays in Nature. The place is a test bed to gauge the bison’s ability to adapt to the Mediterranean climate.
And after carrying out their in situ evaluation, the authors of the aforementioned study conclude that “regardless of whether or not the European bison lived in the Iberian Peninsula in the past, the time has come to implement effective conservation measures that allow increasing and maintaining the biodiversity”.
Furthermore, they say that we must “focus primarily” on the ecological functions of species, “rather than focusing on their origin.”
However, the return of the bison to the Peninsula has many detractors. There is a lot of response. A total of 40 scientists (mostly Spanish) have collected the opposite arguments in an article in which they question rewilding and in which they conclude that the Mediterranean habitat is not appropriate for the European bison. given the current climate regime and its projections into the future. The article will be published in the scientific journal of the Society for Conservation Biology and the list of authors is headed by Carlos Nores, professor of Zoology at the University of Oviedo.
The promoters of the introduction of the European bison have requested on two occasions the inclusion of the European bison in the Spanish Catalog of Endangered Species. And prominent biologists and naturalists supported the petition (Javier Castroviejo, Jorge Casinello, Jan van der Made, Odile Rodríguez de la Fuente, Xavier Ferrer…). Such inclusion would have entailed the implementation of plans and measures under state supervision to promote its conservation. However, the committee of experts that advises the Ministry for the Ecological Transition decided against this inclusion. Their main argument is that we cannot speak of a recovery or reintroduction of a native species.
The European bison (Bison bonasus), introduced to Spanish farms, is not a species that has inhabited the Peninsula, emphasizes José Luis Yela García, professor of Zoology and Conservation Biology at the University of Castilla-La Mancha, member of that committee.
The animal that lived in the Cantabrian caves is the steppe bison (Bison priscus), an extinct species that evolved in Europe to give rise to the European bison, with no traces of the latter left on the Peninsula.
While fossil remains of the disappeared ancestor (the steppe bison) have been found on the Peninsula, no vestiges of the European bison have been found.
“Our central argument is that the recovery of the bison must be done in the countries where it has lived historically and not in those that it never colonized, because they do not meet the climatic or environmental conditions for it to live as a wild species in the past, no less. even today, given the climate change forecasts,” says Carlos Nores.
“For the European bison to be a protected species, it would have to be a native species, typical of this area and adapted to these environmental conditions. We cannot protect in Spain a species that has never existed here before,” says Carlos Nores.
“What makes sense is to defend what we already have,” says Yela.
Other opposition voices fear that the recovery of the bison will be detrimental to the Iberian lynx. “If the objective is to have the bison in the wild, its recovery should be done in areas where it existed and not in an area outside its historical distribution, since it occupies the place where one of the most endangered cats in the world, the Iberian lynx, is recovered” says Miguel Ángel Simón, who directed the feline reintroduction program.
Jorge Cassinello, researcher at the Arid Zones Experimental Station (CSIC), admits that although there is no fossil evidence that this species lived on the Peninsula, these remains have been found in the south of France, a few kilometers from the border. of the Pyrenees, an area that does not represent a geographical barrier for this species.
For this reason, he states that “from an ecological and paleontological point of view, the most plausible hypothesis is that the European bison did live in the Iberian Peninsula; and, given that this species is protected in Europe, I do see its protection in the Peninsula as logical.”
On the other hand, Carlos Nores also replicates this point and maintains that even if fossil remains of the European bison were hypothetically located on the Peninsula, it would not make sense to reintroduce it because neither the habitat nor the conditions that surrounded its ancestral presence no longer exist.
For this expert, it makes no sense to think about reintroduction, nor would it make sense to “reintroduce the lion that exists in Africa but that coexisted on the Peninsula with the steppe bison (and of which it was precisely its predator).”
José Luis Yela abounds in his rejection of the protection of the animal in Spain, saying that the steppe bison lived in very different climatic conditions than today. “The European bison is fundamentally a Central European forest species, it has nothing to do with our Mediterranean conditions; and less with those of Andújar,” he says.
While the steppe bison was a specimen of fauna typically adapted to the cold (it lived with mammoths, woolly rhinos and reindeer…), the European bison adapted to the circumstances once the ice disappeared in the northern hemisphere. Yela sees in the introduction of the bison a “crazy, a whim or interests outside of biology.”
On the other hand, the promoters of the protection of the European bison in Spain see the marginalization of this animal (its non-inclusion in the catalog of protected species) as unjustifiable. For Benigno Varillas, the current legality of a corset that is too tight. “It is the same animal, the same genus, that is evolving. It only disappears (from Europe) in the last 10,000 years, without explaining why,” he proclaims, convinced that “we killed them all,” he laments.
Meanwhile, in the face of official rejection, the bison have been able to be mobilized as livestock and in the enclosures that house them they receive veterinary care (with protections related to sanitation, implantation of the identification ear tag and they are kept isolated separately from domestic livestock). “He is in legal limbo. “They come here like a cow and it is a cow, but everyone sees that it is a wild animal,” says Varillas to denounce the narrow and insufficient framework of legal protection, incapable of accepting this new situation, with the result that an animal wild is welcomed like cattle. Fernando Morán assumes in a practical way that the animal is protected like livestock. “The debate does not worry me. The animal does not know if it is protected or if it is livestock,” he summarizes.
Jordi Bartolomé, professor at the UAB, co-author of the study published in Biodiversity and Conservation, justifies the protection of the European bison in the important ecological function it performs: in its “ability to maintain ecosystems.” This is a task that was previously carried out by their ancestors and in recent times by extensive livestock farming; but “this function is now at risk, given the decline of extensive livestock farming.”
“The bison is essential to confront problems derived from rural abandonment in a country that suffers large fires,” says Fernando Morán. “The natural environment is not in balance without these large herbivores,” he explains.
“This is the great brush cutter,” emphasizes Benigno Varillas.
However, these arguments do not convince their detractors either. “This same research shows that the best natural weeder is the red deer,” says Carlos Noves.
The woody component (plants and shrubs) accounts for 81% of the plant remains in deer feces and 52% in those of the European bison. “And we don’t know to what extent this animal is being protected,” he adds.