“Crows were flying all around”: bloodthirsty attack on a flock in Béziers, seven lambs and a ewe devoured

magictr | March 14, 2024 | Business | No Comments

Yannick Poras, propriétaire du troupeau attaqué – Y.P.

Un cadavre de brebis – Y.P.

Le troupeau de Yannick Poras, avant l'attaque – Y.P.

Les faits se sont déroulés dans la nuit de lundi à mardi à Saint-Martin de l'Arçon. Chiens ou loups ? Il est encore trop tôt pour se prononcer.

When you live in town, in Béziers for example, attacks by stray dogs or wolves on flocks of sheep are often summed up in a few figures: so many animals slaughtered, so many others devoured, without counting the missing ones. For Yannick Poras, breeder in Saint-Martin-de-l'Arçon, it's something completely different: "A real shock",< /em> he confides.

"A real shock"

Monday March 11, this wine grower who maintains a flock of around fifteen sheep to weed his vines and olive groves went to see his animals. Everything was fine. "They are on enclosed grounds of one and a half hectares, it's easy to monitor", he confides. The next day, Tuesday, he went to the Lamalou market, returned around 4:00 p.m., and returned to see the herd: "Immediately I noticed something was wrong. There were crows flying around all around, very low, too low. And then I saw these white spots on the green grass… I understood what had happened."

He stops first next to three corpses gathered together, almost side by side, then two others a little further away. In total, he recovered six, with a lamb and a ewe missings. And even on that point, nothing was found. is certain, as the remains were so dismembered. "I took photos, and I notified the guards at the biodiversity office. They were only able to come on Wednesday afternoon, they examined the five that I had spotted, and they found another where only one leg remained ."

Previously, he had taken the precaution of putting them in a manner: "If left lying around, the remains can quickly be eaten by crows or other scavengers. But when I transported them, I realized that under the skin, there was nothing left. Everything had been devoured, the flesh, the entrails!"

"Carnage"

Who is the culprit ? "We should rather say the culprits, corrects Yannick Poras.< em> You had to be in a pack to cause such carnage." Pack of dogs, or wolves ? "In these cases, the guards make the first observations but they do not comment. We need a more in-depth study of the bites, of the remains in their entirety, he replies.

This is not a first for the Mas de Rouyre winemaker. A few years ago, he already suffered a clearly identified attack from hunting dogs. But this time, no hunting in the hills, and no stray dogs spotted in the area. Then there remains the hypothesis of the wolf, very present in the Haut-Languedoc natural park: "We are in the valley, less than a kilometer from the first houses of Mons-la-Trivalle, but it's possible, concludes Yannick Poras… We know that it's way up there, in the mountain, very close."