They eat at night, and early in the morning, and we get them at 6am to milk them again.”
"So we take them out after the evening milking session, and they eat. "They gather in groups, and rest,” he explains. When the weather is hot, they leave the sheep out overnight, because they will not eat when it is too hot. They try to have them spend as much time outside. He and his two uncles have a herd of 800. The most famous product is Roquefort cheese.Īrnaud Gely raises dairy sheep and sells the milk to Roquefort. Sarah Elzas/RFIĪveyron may be a tipping point, because it’s a department that depends on sheep. The irony is not lost on her, of being an organic farmer, who finds herself pitted against pro-wolf environmentalists.Ī ewe and lambs in Arnaud Gely's barn. That’s the reason I’m here now.”īut now that she’s here, she sees that it is impossible to farm the way she does with wolves in the area. Wolves, she says, represent a wilderness that no longer exists: "People are projecting this desire of wild nature, which I understand! That’s the reason why I became a farmer. "There is no more wild nature, especially in France.” The moon-like landscape was made and is maintained by sheep. It’s a vast and open, and Melanie Brunet says is sometimes called "wild”, but it is not. This is the Causse, an area named a Unesco heritage site in 2011, because of the relationship between pastoral farming and the environment. Most of the Brunet’s sheep spend their time in a 60-hectare area of brush and low trees on a hill rising up behind their farm. The Causse behind the Brunet farm, where most of the flock spends its time eating grass and small bushes.
#RUNNING SHEEP SILHOUETTE HOW TO#
"They learn how to attack, even with the protection dogs, even with fences,” she says, adding that they learn to time the farmers’ comings-and-goings. The wolf attack turned Melanie Brunet into something of an activist, and she has spent time researching preventative measures taken by farmers in the Alps: high fences or protective dogs.īut she says they don’t work, because the wolves outsmart them. In 2016, wolves killed 9 788 sheep in France, and they had not yet spread into Aveyron, which is the department with the most sheep in the country.įarmers here say that that once wolves do arrive, the numbers of attacks will skyrocket, because their pastoral farming methods have been developed for nearly 100 years without predators. The population is growing, as are the number of attacks on livestock. In 2016, there were officially 360 wolves in France. They came naturally, into a national park in the Southern Alps, and started to spread. Wolves were first seen in France in 1992. Melanie Brunet feeds a ewe that has been loosing weight since a wolf attack in 2016. We think it was because they were fragilised." "This winter we realised we had about 20 ewes who were not in good health, and losing weight, and we didn’t know why. Melanie says the wolf attack traumatised the herd, and made the sheep more susceptible to illness. They received 110 euros per lamb, not enough, they say, because they usually sell between 180 and 200 euros. The photos proved to the authorities that the Brunet’s sheep had indeed been attacked by wolves. "Melanie was with him, and she called me and said, ‘do you know what we just saw? A wolf.' There were 15 photos." He put the card in the computer and looked at the photos,” recalls Jean-Christophe. The Brunets got lucky that a scientist friend of theirs had been tracking vultures at a site less than a kilometre away from the farm, using a motion-activated camera, and the camera had been running the night of the attack. Wolves had been attacking sheep in neighbouring departments, but had not been seen in Aveyron before.Īnd French officials generally hold off on identifying wolf attacks, as it is costly to the state, because farmers get compensated for those animals that are killed. The Brunet’s first thought was that it was a stray dog attack. In the morning he discovered the carcasses of four more dead sheep in total, eight were killed in the two attacks, 10 injured. I was wearing a headlamp, and it reflected back. Jean-Christophe recalls the second attack: "I run into the field and fall, because I trip over a dead lamb. On the morning of, Jean-Christophe went to see the herd in a field not far from the house, and found several sheep dead, eviscerated. The Brunet’s sheep are outside from 15 April to the middle of November, rain or shine. Sheep farming in this region depends on the animals being outside as much as possible. Their 150 ewes produce about 180 lambs each year, which they sell for meat. Jean-Christophe and Melanie Brunet run an organic sheep farm in Buzareingues, in the Aveyron department.
0 kommentar(er)
