The promoters of the introduction of the European bison to the Iberian Peninsula have scored a remarkable success this week. A scientific article published in the journal Biodiversity and Conservation, with the participation of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, confirms that the Mediterranean ecosystem is an ideal refuge for the survival of this large protected herbivore in Europe, but not in Spain. This academic support has worsened the dispute between supporters and detractors of the return of this species whose ancestors are portrayed in the caves of Altamira.
But does it make sense to protect the bison in the Iberian Peninsula? Are the measures to promote their conservation in Spain justifiable? The questions are relevant because the bison disappeared from the Peninsula 12,000 years ago.
All of this is happening while the plan that naturalists and veterinarians are promoting, driven by a true passion, is unfolding, and which has already been realized in the arrival in Spain of 171 specimens of European bison. The animals, brought in recent years from Poland, have settled in ten large farms spread out in various places on the Peninsula. Supporters and detractors thus participate in a dull debate that has as its backdrop the rewilding of nature (rewilding).
The Spanish farms chosen to house these animals have, in many cases, an area of between 1,000 and 3,000 hectares, areas where the European bison live in conditions of semi-freedom, although the ultimate aspiration expressed by their promoters is that "in the future 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 able to be reintroduced into the wild in the 1950s from animals in captivity. Now only subpopulations remain in Poland, Belarus and Russia, albeit isolated and confined. And it was only in 2020 that it ceased to be considered a threatened animal to become cataloged as an "almost threatened" species, according to the classification of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN). It is estimated that around 11,000 copies remain.
" Spain is the emblematic country of the bison due to the paintings in the caves of Altamira. We want to contribute to this species not becoming extinct on a European scale. It is help that Europe is asking us for. At the same time, he provides us with a tool to control the vegetation, prevent fires and keep meat on the mountain that serves as carrion...". These are some of the arguments put forward by Benigno Varillas, publicist, naturalist and one of the promoters of the plan to recover the European bison. Disciple of Félix Rodríguez de la Fuente and author of the book collection La stirpe de los libres, Varillas is a great supporter of reforestation.
Another key figure in this effort is the veterinarian Fernando Morán, director of the European Bison Association of Spain, who, with push and pull, now sees the road cleared after having decided to give himself body and soul to this project.
Morán organized the preparations to welcome in 2010 the first shipment of animals that arrived from Poland: seven specimens captured in the Bialowieza forest that were transferred to a zoological center in San Cebrián de Mudá (Palencia), where a small space (17 ha) delimited where they live in semi-freedom.
Morán's initial intention was to convince the Ministry for Ecological Transition of the advisability of bringing around 500 specimens to repopulate large abandoned farms in Spain, evaluate their behavior and assess their ability to reduce vegetation and prevent fires.
This did not prosper; but subsequently, thanks to organized mobilization, the number of farms hosting bison has increased to ten. Among these farms, the Encinarejo stands out, 1,000 hectares of Mediterranean forest in the Sierra d'Andújar, in Jaén, which is home to eighteen animals. The owner of the estate here applies a management model that moves between hunting, ecotourism and promotion to popularize stays in nature.
The site is a test bed to calibrate the bison's ability to adapt to the Mediterranean climate. And after carrying out an on-site assessment, the authors of the referred study conclude that "beyond whether the European bison lived in the Iberian Peninsula in the past or not, the time has come to implement effective conservation measures that allow increase and maintain biodiversity". In addition, they say that it is necessary to "primarily focus" on the ecological functions of species, "instead of focusing on their origin".
However, the return of the bison to the Peninsula also has many detractors. There is a lot of controversy. A total of 40 scientists (mostly Spanish) have collected the opposing 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, due to the current climate regime and its projections towards to 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 Threatened Species. And prominent biologists and naturalists have supported the request (Javier Castroviejo, Odile Rodríguez de la Fuente, Xavier Ferrer...). This inclusion would have led to the implementation of plans and measures with state protection to promote their conservation.
However, the expert committee that advises the Ministry for Ecological Transition decided against that inclusion. His main argument is that we cannot speak of a recovery or reintroduction of a native species.
The European bison (Bison bonasus), introduced in Spanish farms, is not a species that has already inhabited the Peninsula, emphasizes José Luis Yela García, professor of Zoology and Conservation Biology at the University of Castile-La Mancha, member of 'that committee.
The animal that illustrates the Cantabrian caves is the steppe bison (Bison priscus), an extinct species that evolved in Europe to give rise to the European bison, without any traces of the latter remaining on the Peninsula. While fossil remains of the extinct ancestor (steppe bison) have been found in 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, and even now, given the forecasts of climate change", says Nores. The argument is that for the European bison to deserve to be a protected species it should be a native species, native to this area and adapted to these environmental conditions. "We cannot protect in Spain a species that has never been here before", he says. "What makes sense is to defend what we already have," says Yela.
Other opposing voices fear that the recovery of the bison will be detrimental to the Iberian lynx. "If the goal is to have the bison in the wild, its recovery should be done in areas it inhabited and not in an area outside its historical distribution, since it occupies the place where one of the most threatened felines is recovered in the world, the Iberian lynx", asserts Miguel Ángel Simón, who directed the feline's reintroduction program.
Jorge Cassinello, researcher at the Arid Zones Experimental Station (CSIC), admits that although there is no fossil evidence that this species inhabited the Peninsula, these remains have indeed 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 here, and since this species is protected in Europe, I do see it as logical that it should be protected in the Peninsula".
On the other hand, Carlos Nores also replicates this point and states that even if, hypothetically, fossil remains of the European bison were found in the Peninsula, it would not make sense to reintroduce it either because neither the habitat nor the conditions that surrounded it exist anymore their ancestral presence. For this expert, it does not make sense to think about reintroduction, just as it would not make sense to "reintroduce the lion that is in Africa but that coexisted in the Peninsula with the steppe bison (and from which it was, precisely their predator)”.
José Luis Yela reaffirms the rejection of the protection of the animal in Spain saying that the steppe bison lived in climatic conditions very different from those of now. “The European bison is fundamentally a Central European forest species, it has nothing to do with our Mediterranean conditions; and less so with Andújar's," he says.
While the steppe bison was a specimen of fauna typically adapted to the cold (it lived with mammoths, woolly rhinoceroses, reindeer...), the European bison adapted to the circumstances once the ices of the northern hemisphere Yela sees in the introduction of the bison a "guilladura, a caprice or interests alien to biology".
On the other hand, the promoters of the protection of the European bison in Spain see the marginalization of this animal as unjustifiable (the non-inclusion in the catalog of protected species). For Benigno Varillas, the current legality is too narrow a corset. "It is the same animal, the same genus, which is evolving. It only disappeared (from Europe) in the last 10,000 years, without explaining why”, he proclaims, convinced that “we killed them all”.
In the meantime, despite the official rejection, the bison have been able to be mobilized as livestock and in the enclosures where they are housed they receive veterinary care (with protections related to sanitation, implantation of the identification tag and it is kept isolated from domestic livestock) .
"They are in a 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, unable to accommodate this innovative situation, with the result that a wild animal is welcomed as cattle.
Fernando Morán practically assumes that the animal is protected as livestock. "The debate does not amuse me. The animal does not know if it is protected or if it is livestock", he summarizes.
