It appears that farmers in the north of the peninsula are starting to take up arms about the reintroduction of protected species – mainly, wolves and bears.
A number of these animals have been released into the wild over the last 10 years, and it seems that they are breeding happily. However, the recent cold weather has brought about what many farmers always feared – attacks on their flocks by these predators. Indeed, the Castilian Farmers Union warns that it is only a matter of time before a human is attacked, pointing to the recent rifling of bins in mountain villages by hungry bears (Espana Directo recently had some lovely shots of a bear mother and her cub pottering around in the outskirts of a rural village).
And only today I was watching an interview with a farmer who has hit upon a novel solution to the problem, after loosing several sheep to a pack of wolves – he keeps a couple of donkeys in with the sheep. Their braying alerts him when wolves are close and seems to be keeping them at bay.