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Paper short abstract:

The reintroduction of brown bears in the Pyrenees brought about a collective herds policy to reduce sheep casualties. Bears' unbounded mobility has moved sheep across (un)bounded pastures. New administrative logics driven by a wildlife program awoke and confronted with old territorial boundaries

Paper long abstract:

The bear reintroduction program was launched in 1996 when the population was considered almost extinct in the Pyrenees. After eight specimens translocated from Slovenia, the allegedly unpredicted rise of bear attacks on sheep led to the implementation of a new herding policy by the Catalan government in 2010. Collective herds consisting in gathering several local sheep flocks were organized. Following a triad of prevention measures—shepherds, guarding dogs, and electrified night camps—, the public administration funded this policy. Despite of local farmers' opposition, the reintroduction program was devised as a win-win scenario claiming to restore not only biodiversity values, but also an old communal management of herds and pastures. In this paper, I propose to approach the bear program as the interplay of sovereign, disciplinary, and neoliberal environmentalities that design rather than restore new administrative logics over long-standing, although recently blurred territorial boundaries. Focusing on a specific collective herd, I argue that this wildlife program has awakened, but also remade old rights to former common pastures without acknowledging their relevance beforehand. Releasing bears and implementing collective herds, moving flocks from other villages that were not historically allowed to graze over those pastures may lead, as it has done so, to social grievances among local farmers. Bears' mobility is unbounded and may be unruly, but the ensuing territorial conflicts tied to pastures usage by livestock should not be deemed as unexpected secondary issues from a large carnivore reintroduction program. They simply are constitutive of it