CONSERVATIONISTS have promised to launch legal action after La Rioja became the first region in Spain to allow trophy hunters to keep wolves’ heads as a souvenir.
Starting this month, hunters who shoot a wolf will be allowed to keep its head or pelt as a trophy – as long as they cough up €1,298.67 for a permit.
The move has provoked fury from conservation groups including the WWF, who warn it could open ‘the door to indiscriminate wolf killing’.
WWF and other groups have vowed to launch legal proceedings in an attempt to block the loophole in court, with Luis Suarez, the WWF’s conservation co-ordinator in Spain, labelling the measure as ‘political and incomprehensible’.
He added that there was ‘no scientific justification to kill the few wolves that inhabit La Rioja’.
Spain’s second smallest autonomous community by size, La Rioja is home to a tiny wolf population – believed to be just one resident pack alongside four more that overlap with neighbouring Castilla y Leon.
Wolf hunting was banned in 2021 after the Spanish government extended special protection status to the Iberian wolf across the country.
However, Spain’s parliament voted to reverse the hunting ban in the north of the country earlier this year after a coalition of parties including the conservative Partido Popular (PP), far-right Vox, Basque nationalist PNV and Catalan pro-independence Junts per Catalunya threw their support behind an amendment to a food waste law.
Under the terms of the amendment, the killing of wolves is ‘justified’ if the species are perceived to pose a threat to Spain’s ‘productive system’.
The move was backed by farmers who argued that increased wolf numbers were responsible for thousands of attacks on livestock.
But animal rights party PACMA described the reversal as ‘the biggest step backwards in wildlife conservation in years’.
A series of culls are currently underway across northern Spain in an effort to rein in numbers.
Asturias has authorised the killing of up to 53 wolves, equating to 15% of its resident population, while Cantabria has set a target of 41 wolves to be culled, 20% of its population.
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‘no scientific justification to kill the few wolves that inhabit La Rioja’.