Fernando Morán’s vital revelation came with the attack of a bug almost two meters high and weighing 500 kilos. The veterinarian was visiting the Santillana del Mar zoo (Cantabria) for leisure when a female European bison turned towards him. “He bumped me, something that has never happened,” says Morán. It is a peaceful animal. His black eyes, peaked beard and brown fur did the rest. There was a crush. The veterinarian decided to dedicate himself entirely to the recovery of the species. In fact, since this path began in 2009, the European bison has gone from having 24 specimens in Spanish zoos to 178 throughout the Iberian Peninsula, including herds in semi-freedom. But his work is not without controversy. Especially because there is no evidence that this species ever lived here. In the Middle Ages, the European bison (Bison bonasus) was widespread in much of the continent. It was distributed from France and present-day Germany to the Baltic and eastern Ukraine, reaching the Caucasus. It became a popular hunting trophy and ended up on the brink of extinction at the beginning of the 20th century. The last animal was hunted in 1927 and, at its worst, barely 12 specimens survived, scattered in zoos and sanctuaries. Today the situation for the largest living European mammal has changed. Conservation work over the last century has borne fruit and the herbivore has more than 9,000 specimens, of which about 6,800 live in freedom distributed in 40 wild herds, especially in Poland, Belarus and Russia. For this reason, in 2020 the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) decided to lower the level of danger of extinction of the species to a lower category. It is listed as “Near Threatened” on the Red List. Growth in Spain Among those efforts to conserve the species are those of Morán, a member of the European Center for Bison Conservation (EBCC), the international network that brings together breeders of the species. In Spain there are 18 enclaves with European bison, from farms to zoos, which have been proliferating especially in recent years. However, since 2018, bison have only been allocated to farms that exceed 200 hectares, so that these animals can be semi-freedom. «They reproduce very well. From 2009 to 2024, 130 bison have been born,” says Morán. The herd on the Sierra de Andújar farm (Jaén). It is in semi-freedom, since its release is prohibited in Spain / EPIn Spain there are already four large plots in which herds of up to 25 specimens can be seen. The animals roam in the Sierra de Andújar (Jaén), in Extremadura, in Castilla y León and Castilla-La Mancha. “The motivation to start these projects is usually to help the species, to conserve an animal in danger,” says Morán. . In the end, “large fauna excites us. A whale is not the same as a sardine,” he exemplifies. The interest of the association that it directs in Spain is also that the farm ends up generating income from ecotourism while the animal “improves the space”, contributing to its renaturalization. «There are many people who think it is a romantic idea, but the reality is that these projects have their processes and it has to be very clear. It costs a lot to bring the bison to Spain, to take care of them, to monitor them…,” he says. In the last 15 years, the organization has evaluated up to 180 requests and has only developed a little more than a dozen. Among the benefits that the veterinarian outlines is reducing the vegetation load on the farms and reducing the risk of fires, improving the presence of insects by restoring the nitrogen load in the soil, fighting against depopulation by offering a business model , as well as acting as a genetic reservoir for the species. AltamiraBut some scientists have questioned whether the species should be raised in the Iberian Peninsula, even on private farms. A few weeks ago, a multidisciplinary group of 40 researchers from 25 universities advised against the introduction of the European bison as part of the Iberian fauna. The problem, they say in an article, is that it does not meet any of the objectives that are supposedly sought with its presence. In fact, there is no evidence that this species crossed the Pyrenees, even after searching for fossils. It is not the type of prehistoric bison represented in Altamira, known as “steppe bison”, a different and extinct species that lived in a habitat known as the “mammoth steppe”, which does not exist today. “We intended to make clear or suggest that many things “They were incorrect or false,” says Carlos Nores, professor of Zoology at the University of Oviedo and lead author of the article. The group is aware that none of these specimens currently live in the wild in Spain, but they highlight that in 2020 there was a request to try to classify the bovid as a wild animal to be released into the wild, as well as its inclusion in the list of endangered species. The request was denied by the Ministry for the Ecological Transition, but in Andalusia “pressure” has persisted so that the animals can be released into the environment. “We saw that it could be dangerous,” says the expert, who assures that the consequences of releasing them into freedom are unknown. “If an experiment is done to see what happens and we see that it doesn’t work well, how can they be removed?” he says. And if it goes well, something that he believes is “unlikely,” it could end up as an invasive species, as happened with the hippos that Pablo Escobar took to Colombia: the drug trafficker bought four on a whim and they have thrived in the environment. Today there are more than 170, they cannot be killed and they are destroying the vegetation in the area. The Colombian Government has been trying to figure out what to do with them for years. Nores also questions that the specimens are brought to private farms in Spain, where the climatic conditions are not the best for the animal. And he gives another closer example of the unintended consequences of introducing the animal: the European bison in Germany, which were released on a farm in North Rhine-Westphalia in 2009. The problem is that they ended up escaping and are now causing damage to the forests. neighbors, tearing the bark off the trees. They cannot be killed, because they are a protected species, and the organization that freed them has declared bankruptcy over compensation claims. European bison AFP «We think it is very good that the species is recovered, and that it is done outside the strongholds where they remain. But it should be done not in the Iberian Peninsula. If they never lived here, why now? “Just because the density of inhabitants is lower in Spain than in Germany?” he asks. Adaptation to the environmentMorán is no stranger to controversy, although he assures that his intention “is never reintroduction, which has to have a legal basis.” And although he does not rule out that in the future it may be demonstrated that the animal did arrive in Spain, today his project “is to help a species to have more specimens and to relocate the species, in case there is a pandemic that takes away part of the bison in Central Europe. Furthermore, by subjecting the herbivore to a different climate, it encourages “evolution to propose new genetic diversities.” The emblematic case is that of the El Encinarejo farm, in Jaén, with an area of 1,000 hectares. The project has been underway for four years, with conditions that “could be unsmokable due to the heat,” says Morán. But the bovid has adapted. The females, he says, have delayed heat for three months. This way the calves do not have to face the lack of grass in August, when they are most vulnerable. “It’s incredible,” summarizes Morán. «These large herbivores usually have a fairly wide range of plasticity and in this case it has been seen that they have had no problems consuming Mediterranean species, they have withstood high temperatures and it seems that things are going well, as long as we take into account that they are limited systems. », says Jordi Bartolomé, a professor at the Autonomous University of Barcelona who published a study on the Andalusian herd in April. «I think there is a lot of prejudice,» laments the expert about the controversial presence of the animal. «Renaturation seeks to have close conditions to fulfill a function that allows maintaining diversity and ecosystem services. What could extensive livestock farming do? Probably. But reality is what it is. In many parts of the Peninsula, extensive livestock farming is in decline. This would complement the role of other large herbivores such as deer or ibex,” he says.
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