ARCHIVED - Hunters kill native Iberian Lynx near Doñana National Park in Huelva

The body was found floating in the Guadiamar river, where it appeared to have been for some time.

An Iberian Lynx found dead in a river in Huelva earlier this week was killed by hunters, according to Ecologistas en Acción. Although the Andalusian Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock, Fisheries and Sustainable Development reported that the carcass was in very bad condition and would have to be examined to determine the causes of death, the conservationist group insists that it was shot by hunters.

The lynx, Ecologistas en Acción said in a press release, was found floating in the river at its confluence with the Arroyo de la Cigüeña and had clearly been in the water for a few days.

Wounds on the feline’s front legs near the shoulders appeared to have been caused by buckshot cartridges, which are strictly forbidden even for hunting, they explained.

There are frequent confrontations between lynx and hunters, as they both share the same prey; rabbits and although the lynx will habitually shy away from hunters, there have been multiple incidents in which hunters have broken the law and either killed or injured these threatened native cats.

There are currently more than 460 specimens of the endangered species in Andalusia, mainly due to captive breeding and re-introduction programmes into which the regional government, the European Union and businesses have invested millions of euros, trying to create safe environments in which the species can be safely re-introduced into the wild and thrive in the less densely populated countryside of Spain and Portugal.

However, they face two main man-related threats: road accidents and hunting.

In the Doñana National Park in Huelva, hunting accounts for 16 per cent of unnatural deaths, yet the conservationist group complains that the cases are always shelved and investigations never seem to lead to any prosecutions. There have been at least 6 recent cases of lynx being shot to death by hunters in Andalusia, some of which were found with up to 30 bullet wounds and although the hunting community is part of the latest working group established to protect the lynx, the deaths are obviously continuing.

“Killing specimens of a protected species should never go unpunished, and even less so in the case of species in which a lot of economic and social effort is invested through the Life Lynx Connect project, and the Life Iberlince project previously funded by the EU which is giving promising results,” the conservationist group stressed.