Softly spoken and charming, François Arcangeli is an unlikely recipient of death threats. Nor does Arbas – the tranquil and somewhat forlorn village tucked away in the foothills of the French Pyrenees 50 miles east of Lourdes where Arcangeli has been the mayor for 13 years – seem a likely location for violent demonstrations.
The cause of this unrest are brown bears.
"In spring 2006 the French government arranged for three bears from Slovenia to be released into the forests near Arbas," Arcangeli tells me. "Two others were released near other villages. Gendarmerie intelligence warned us that there might be a few protesters, mostly farmers worried about their sheep being attacked. But 250 turned up, smashing anything they could find outside the town hall, trying to break in, spraying paint and throwing bottles of blood. Eighty gendarmes tried to keep order."
The plan, agreed between Spain, France and Andorra, had been to introduce 15 bears over three years but since the Arbas riots no more have been released.
Of the five introduced in 2006, one gave birth to two cubs. But two others, both females, died. One fell from a cliff in a freak accident. The other was killed by a car on a road outside Lourdes, much to the delight of many local farmers and the sorrow of conservationists.
"We are immensely satisfied that this bear was killed. This is a great relief for farmers," Marie-Lise Broueilh, the president of the Association Interprofessionnelle du Mouton Barèges Gavarnie, an organisation promoting mountain sheep meat, commented at the time.
Bears are shy creatures, easily frightened by people. And while claims of aggressive bears are often promoted by anti-bear interests, there are virtually no records of anyone being attacked anywhere in Western Europe. So forest walking in bear country is perfectly safe. And there is little conflict with tourist developments such as ski centres because the bears hibernate in winter. And skiing takes place on higher mountain slopes above the forests and pasturelands where bears live.
More importantly, brown bears are largely vegetarian. In spring they feed on flowering plants and grasses, adding in fruits and berries during summer. In autumn, preparing for hibernation, they need to eat fat-rich foods, so acorns, beechnuts and hazelnuts figure highly. And bears really do love honey, hence their liking for wild bee nests and beehives. Honey-making is an artisan industry in the Pyrenees. But beehives are easy to protect with electric fences or by elevating hives on tripods.
Brown bears will kill other mammals for food. Powerfully built, with males weighing up to 700lb and females 440lb, and a body length of up to 8ft, they are quite capable of killing large deer. Sheep, though, are easier prey. Therein lies the source of most of the conflict.
"Of the half million sheep in the French Pyrenees, about 15,000 die naturally each year because of disease, bad weather and falls," Frédéric Decaluwe of the Office of Hunting and Wildlife, a government agency, says. "Two hundred to 300 a year are killed by bears, and the farmers are compensated."
And that compensation seems pretty generous. For a sheep worth between €20 and €100 at market, depending on its age and quality, a farmer gets €140 for each one killed by a bear plus another €140 'disturbance premium' per incident. Similar compensation schemes operate on the Spanish side of the Pyrenees.
"We usually get the compensation to the farmer within three weeks," Decaluwe says. "If there's doubt about what killed the sheep [wolves, stray dogs and even the farmers' own dogs] a commission on which farmers are represented meets at the end of each season to assess the evidence. If there is still any doubt, the compensation is paid."
Arcangeli, who is also the president of Pays de l'Ours-ADET, an organisation promoting bear conservation, thinks the farmers do well from the system.
"Before the compensation for bear kills, farmers used to complain that stray dogs killed their sheep. But they never claim that now, only bears. It's always bears," he says, laughing.
Brown bears are still reasonably common across North America, Russia and northern and central Asia. Their range once covered the whole of Europe, too. But that was before forest clearance steadily reduced their habitat. By the Middle Ages, Europe's brown bears were confined to the less accessible mountain areas. Hunting finished most of them off and they were extinct in Britain before the Norman conquest.
Today, their European stronghold is in western Russia and northern Scandinavia, where thousands still live. They fare reasonably well in some Eastern European countries such as Romania, Slovenia and Croatia.
In Western Europe, where they are strictly protected, their populations are fragmented, very small and vulnerable to extinction. Most are confined to inaccessible forested mountain ranges. In the 1930s there were perhaps 200 bears in the Pyrenees. By the mid-1990s as few as six remained, even though hunting had been banned in Spain and France. Three bears from Slovenia were introduced in 1996.
One of the few remaining native Pyrenean bears, a female, was shot trying to defend its cubs against a hunter's dog in 2004, an incident that the then French president, Jacques Chirac, called "a great loss for France and Europe" and that galvanised public opinion in favour of better protection.
In August last year Carla Bruni-Sarkozy joined the debate by writing to several environment groups, supporting the reintroduction of brown bears to the Pyrenees. "There should be no question, in our country, of choosing between bear and man," she said. 'We must find a balanced means of coexistence. On the one hand, the presence of bears in the Pyrenees reflects a willingness to protect biodiversity; on the other, the support of the local population is essential."
Pyrenean farmers will have to change the way they farm if they are to coexist with bears, and payments are available to encourage them to adapt. Most of it is channelled through local voluntary organisations and comes from the Spanish and French governments and through an EU project run by the World Wildlife Fund set up to promote the conservation of large carnivores across five European countries.
I meet Catherine Lacroix, a farmer in the tiny village of Barjac, 10 miles east of Arbas, and a founder member of the Association pour la Cohabitation Pastorale (ACP), the Association for Pastoral Cohabitation. Walking with her on her farm's lush fields framed by beech woods on the hill slopes around, it is not easy to spot the white Pyrenean mountain dog – known here as a patou – among the sheep flock.
"The patou lives out with the sheep whatever the weather, day and night," Lacroix says. 'It's here to protect the flock and if the flock is in danger, from a bear perhaps or wolves or a feral dog, the patou will become aggressive, barking loudly. They have to be brought up with the sheep as puppies and they are never treated like pets. Otherwise they couldn't do their job."
Using government grants paid by the ACP as enticement, about 200 farmers now use a patou. They receive a one-off payment of €700 once the dog has been trained to the correct standard (to offset its purchase cost plus the time to train it) and a further €250 annually.
A survey by the ACP of 37 farmers using these dogs found a reduction in the number of killed sheep by bears of more than 90 per cent. But many farmers, Lacroix acknowledges, are unwilling to accept the extra work required to train and keep a patou and are resentful that they have to change the way they manage their sheep.
Money from the EU project is also available to employ shepherds and to accommodate them in mountain huts when sheep flocks are taken up to the high summer pastures. Watching over their charges by day, with or without a patou, shepherds then round up the flock at night using a collie, often bringing them within a temporary enclosure protected by an electric fence.
Robert Wojciechowski runs a small company designing electric fences and other bear deterrents including lights, pyrotechnics and harmless lasers that can be triggered if a bear approaches. In the mountains they can be run using solar panels. Farmers buying such devices receive government grants to defray their cost.
"There are about 200 farmers in the three valleys I work in," Wojciechowski says. "Forty have bought my fences but even they are not happy knowing that they have to protect their sheep against bears. Not that it's always bears – feral dogs are just as much of a problem.
"Paris imposes bears in the Pyrenees," he continues. "They don't ask the farmers; they have no understanding of the issue from the point of view of the farmers. It's a war between farmers and bears; city people who like to think there are bears here and country people who don't want them."
Olivier Maurin, who farms 200 sheep to produce cheese at Agnos about 12 miles south-west of Pau, is typical of many. "I love bears but I don't want to have to live with them. For us farmers it's not about compensation, it's changing our way of life, our way of farming. I know we get EU subsidies to farm but we would have to get much more money before we accept bears here."
Slovenia, whose extensive forests have supplied the bears introduced to the Pyrenees, has one of the larger, more stable bear populations in Western Europe – at least a few hundred.
"People are used to living alongside bears in Slovenia," says Aleksandra Majic Skrbinšek at the University of Ljubljana, who is studying public attitudes to large carnivores (bears, lynx and wolves) in several European countries.
"Each year our government licenses a number of bears to be hunted. Most of the hunting is done by local people and they take a responsible attitude. Bears are shot for trophies and the meat is sold, so the local economy benefits. Although some people believe there should be no bear hunting, it means that country people value their bears and have a personal investment in maintaining the population.
"There is much less conflict here with farmers than in the Pyrenees. In Slovenia, sheep have always been gathered into enclosures at night to protect them. In other places where bears have been introduced, in Trentino in Italy for instance,
the state authorities talk directly to the local people about the options. In France they just talk to the local politicians and other representatives. So local people, the farmers, feel that things are imposed on them."
It isn't an argument that Frédéric Decaluwe accepts. "We try hard to talk to farmers," he says. "Every summer we have nine people outdoors doing just that. The main problem is that farmers don't want to talk about bears because they don't want bears. They say they want bears removed, not more brought here."
Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet, the state secretary for ecology in the Sarkozy government, has made clear her determination 'to restore the population of bears in the Pyrenees in accordance with France's international obligations for biodiversity'.
"The French government has all the facts,"' Decaluwe says. "We have perhaps 20 bears in the Pyrenees.It's not a sustainable population. Our farmers are compensated well for any problems and they get EU subsidies to farm. We have a detailed action plan that includes introducing more bears. But it's all so slow. It's local politics."
