French hunter given suspended sentence for killing protected bear

An 81-year-old hunter in France has been fined and handed a four-month suspended jail sentence for killing an endangered bear in the Pyrenees mountains.

The man said he had "no other option" but to open fire on the brown bear when it attacked him during a boar-hunt in 2021.

Fifteen other hunters were also fined and must collectively pay more than €60,000 (£51,000) in damages to environmental associations that had filed a civil suit against them.

The 150kg female bear, nicknamed Caramelles, has since been preserved by a taxidermist and is on display at the Toulouse Natural History Museum.

The Foix Criminal Court heard that the group were boar-hunting in the Pyrenees, the mountain range that separates southern France and Spain, when two bear cubs emerged.

Shortly afterwards their mother appeared, charging at the man and dragging him several metres, before he shot and killed the animal.

"She grabbed my left thigh, I panicked and fired a shot. She backed away growling, she went around me and bit my right calf, I fell, she was eating my leg," he told the court.

"I reloaded my rifle and fired."

The shooting happened in the Mont Valier nature reserve near the village of Seix, Ariège. Prosecutors said they should not have been there in the first place, because it was 1,300ft (396m) outside an authorised hunting area.

But the defence lawyer for 14 of the hunters, Fanny Campagne, criticised "the lack of signs indicating that hunting was prohibited".

The shooter was fined €750, his rifle has been confiscated and his hunting licence revoked.

In a statement, bear-preservation association Pays de l'ours said the verdict "seems justified".

"All the hunters were found guilty, which is the most important thing for us," the association's president, Sabine Matraire, was quoted as saying in Le Monde.

"We hope that this ruling will be followed by a raising of awareness among the hunting community," she added.

Brown bear populations saw a sharp decline in the Pyrenees, with only about 70 left in 1954, according to the region's tourism board.

But numbers have slowly climbed up since 1990s when three bears were brought over from Slovenia as part of a reintroduction programme.

In 2024, the French Office for Biodiversity estimated that the mountain range is now home to about 96 bears.