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ESSENTIAL DESTINATIONS
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MONTH: June 2006
Canned hunts for rare imported “trophy” species are booming in Spain
Only U.S. hunters visit South Africa more than Spaniards, who make up about 8.5% of the South Africa hunting traffic––and Spanish hunting ranch proprietors are trying to keep them home, even if it requires stocking rare species in violation of the law.
“In January 2006, 12 Indian blackbuck antelope were confiscated from a farm near Cáceres, Extremadura,” recently wrote Sunday Telegraph correspondent David Harrison. “Guardia Civil officers said they had found evidence that exotic beasts had been hunted illegally on at least six reserves. During the first half of last year the Guardia Civil game protection unit confiscated 678 illegally imported live animals across Spain.”
In the most sensational case, the Guardia Civil in December 2005 arrested seven people allegedly in the act of starting to illegally “hunt” a semi-tame lion and a tiger at the Lunares reserve, near Monterrubio de la Serena in the Sierra del Oro mountains, near the Portuguese border.
The suspects––three hunters, the land owner, and three staff––were reportedly carrying .22 rifles, considered much too light to quickly kill a big cat.
The lion and tiger, apparently bought from a traveling circus, were sent to a zoo near Malaga.
A raid on the same farm a month earlier found the remains of a tiger cub and several wolves, but not sufficient evidence to link the killings to any one suspect.
While hunting internationally recognized endangered and threatened species in Spain is illegal, hunting captive-reared animals is not. Hunting ranches in the region where the canned hunt was raided commonly offer the opportunity to shoot captive-reared stag, boar, partridge, rabbits, and thrushes, wrote Elizabeth Nash of The Independent.