Paper short abstract:

The reintroduction of bears in the Pyrenees has entailed the arrival of shepherds to tend the flocks. This historical figure stands today between the local farmers and State bodies, making us reflect on the identity formation behind this rewilding project through the lenses of the rural-urban divide

Paper long abstract:

After the bear reintroduction program was launched in 1996 in the Pyrenees, the Catalan government decided to implement a regrouping policy in 2010 to reduce the bear attacks on the sheep flocks that were grazing loose over the high mountain pastures. This policy consisted of gathering several small flocks belonging to different local farmers from adjacent villages with the support of a set of three protection measures: shepherds, livestock guardian dogs, and electrified enclosures for the night camps. Through the resulting regrouped flocks, the previous hierarchical dual relationship between farmers and shepherds gave way to a more complex triangle of stakeholders in which the bear program’s decision-makers, including politicians, experts, and environmental NGOs, have taken a crucial role. Considering the bear program as a State-driven territorialisation process over the local farming practices, I propose to draw attention to the shepherds’ current ambiguous position to better understand the persistence of the conflicts among the primary sector around this rewilding project. Taking care of local farmers’ sheep but being hired by the public administration through the bear program’s funds, mountain shepherds lay in-between two opposing poles. In this new triangle, they stand in an ambiguous vertex, on the edge of the rural insiders and urban outsiders, respectively personalized by the local farmers and the State bodies and animalized by the sheep and bears. As such, they press us to reflect on the identity formation behind a State-driven rewilding project through the lenses of the rural/urban divide.