Tallulah Taylor
THEY each paid €1000 to participate in the shoot which took place on a huge private estate in Andalucia.
The 70 hunters dispatched half a dozen boars or deer each which were fenced in and could not escape from the Los Posteruelos estate in the Sierra Morena hills outside Cordoba.
It was certainly an orgy of bloodshed, clearly seen, when helpers laid out the hundreds of animal corpses side by side.
In fact a total of 447 animals were slaughtered in the hunt.
Now, after photos of the kill went viral online it has been widely condemned by animal rights and environmentalist groups.
Joaquin Reina from Ecologists in Action labelled the hunt an ‘orgy of blood and death’.
He said: ‘This is the daily life of most of the fenced estates in Sierra Morena, but also throughout Andalusia, with some 500,000 hectares fenced, Extremadura, Castilla-La Mancha and the Levante region.’
He explained that the massacre would be impossible on an open estate: ‘The only defence is escape and this is absolutely diminished by wire fences.’
Manuel Gallardo, president of the Royal Spanish Hunting Federation, defended the shoot insisting that such hunts are ‘necessary due to the overabundance of species’.
He added that hunting generates €6.5billion a year in Spain.
The population of wild boar has boomed in recent years often encroaching on urban environments and posing a threat to safety on the roads.
Spain’s ministry of agriculture (MAPA) recorded 373,225 wild boar caught and killed in 2018 – while estimates from Spain’s IREC institution say the country will be overrun with 2 million by 2025.
According to 2020 figures from Spain’s traffic authority (DGT) road accidents caused by wild boar increased 47% in just two years.
