Demand for hunting of protected lynx

With the call for opening the hunt on lynx , the hunters association of the Rohrbach county located along the international recognized Green Belt in the northern part of Upper Austria, definitely made it into the news last week.

The lynx there are part of the trilateral population of Germany, the Czech Republic and Austria. After their extirpation in Middle Europe, individual lynx returned to Austria after the fall of the iron curtain, which was impenetrable even for wildlife. The Austrian population is still far too smal to be considered stable. And the whole bohemia lynx population urgently would need to get connected with the ones in the Carpathian in the east, the Alps in the south and the Harz in middle-Germany.
Right in these days we hear some loud voice from the regional hunters association to open the hunt on lynx

Last year, the international monitoring with camera traps confirmed 61 single-roaming individuals overall spread across the great bohemian ecosystem, big enough to take a whole day driving across its east-west extension.
Regional lynx expert Thomas Engleder describes the current population size as being only a fourth of a sustainable vital Lynx population.

Since more than 20 years a cooperation of financial sources, from private to government and EU plus lots of idealism kept the project upand running.
One of the biggest challenges for all who are actively involved is to convince local people to let go of small scaled way of thinking but to think big – mainly in regard to size of lynx territories, of dispersal and wandering distances but also in regard to responsibility and possibilities which animals like the lynx can bring to a region.
The lynx is a strictly protected species under the EU Directive 92/43, under national and provincial law.

Calling for opening the hunt on lynx is contradicting this EU wide initiative to give native species the right to live in their millenia old home and react on the latest research showing the positive effects of the large carnivores on an ecosystem.

We from EWS strongly oppose such publicly announced demands, especially since we far too often have to realize that the strong protection status of the lynx exists on paper only and the lack of executing violaters is hampering the recolonization on a serious level already.