We are not alone, as Nick Cave sings at the end of “The Snow Panther”, a documentary with Sylvain Tesson and Vincent Munier. Others than us inhabit this planet. They hide, often we don’t even see them. They spy on us behind a rock, they smell us, because they are afraid. They have learned to live at night to protect themselves from the fiercest inhabitant of the Earth, the most ruthless assassin, the tyrant of the seas and the emerged lands: man.
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There is a lot of talk these days in Italy about wild animals because on April 5, and for the first time, a young man was attacked and killed by a bear in Trentino while running in the forest. The 17-year-old bear is the daughter of two specimens “reintroduced” – that’s the technical term – in 1999 as part of a repopulation project. Five males and five females captured in Slovenia, put to sleep, transported to Trentino and released, as part of one of our bioengineering experiments, ones that sometimes go into a spin. Indeed, in 2023, these bears and their descendants have become too numerous, around a hundred. Trentino is a mountainous but densely populated region – do the Dolomites ring a bell? One day, a young man leaves his house, goes running, crosses the path of the bear who, frightened, attacks him, perhaps because her cubs are nearby. This immediately triggers a political debate: the right wants their total extermination, the left talks about environmental culture and finally this bear will have to be captured and put in a cage where she will forever await the sentence. If she could talk, maybe she would ask us: “but when are you going to stop taking yourself for the masters of all that breathes, as you have written even in your sacred texts? »
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There is one thing that never ceases to amaze me: in our highly urbanized country, the habitat of wild animals, namely the forest, occupies 11 million hectares, or about a third of its total area. From the middle of the 20th century to today, it has doubled. It was a time when the forest and its inhabitants reached a historically low level: wood was used for heating, animals for food and, in the Alps, most mammals had disappeared. It’s not what you read in fairy tales, but for Heidi and her grandfather, coming across a fawn was unimaginable because in the first half of the 20th century, men had eaten everything. After the war, the trend began to reverse: the mountains were rapidly depopulated (in some valleys, there is talk of an exodus of 80% of the population in thirty years), the standard of living increased, the he impact of anthropogenic pressure on the forest has diminished. It is enough for the man to leave for the plants to immediately take over the land.
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“The bear, with whom we played with fire”
For the return of the animals, it’s another story. The ibex, for example, had only survived in the Gran Paradiso park because that was the former hunting reserve of the King of Italy. From there, it was reintroduced throughout the Alpine arc using the same process as for the bear. The same goes for deer, fallow deer, chamois and roe deer, sometimes from Germany, the Balkans or from wildlife reserves that function as farms. All these operations were carried out independently, without any coordination, be it from the park itself or from hunting associations, as was the case for the wild boar: a species is reintroduced with the sole aim of being able to to hunt, in other words for entertainment. Other species, like the wolf, have managed on their own. The wolf, which had survived in the Abruzzo National Park, began its return after the war. Seventy years later, it has spread throughout the Alps. So many animals have gotten out of hand, like those stray dogs crossed with wolves. Or like those wild boars, introduced for the pleasure of hunters, which have become so invasive that we see them roaming around Rome in search of waste. And finally the bear we played with fire with.
We Italians, what do we know about them? Nothing, I would say. And yet, we live or we must live together. Where are we educated, and who, to enter into a relationship with wildlife, this happy novelty of which we have neither memory nor culture? The forest occupies a third of our territory, but how do we get to know it and visit it?
At this point in my story, I would like to point out what seems to me to be an absurdity: in 2017, when the area of the forest doubled, new animal species populated it, and the cohabitation between man and animals wildlife was becoming increasingly problematic (and interesting), the Corps Forestier d’Etat was abolished and merged with the Gendarmerie for reasons of economy. We understand today that it should rather have been strengthened, that we badly need a Forestry Corps, whatever the name or status given to it, civilian or military. Not only because he takes care of our forests, but also because he teaches us to know them. So that the animals are a little less afraid of us.
Translated from Italian by Véronique Cassarin-Grand.
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Born in Milan in 1978, Paul Cognetti enjoyed great success with his first novel, “Les Huit Montagnes” (Stock, 2017), winner of the Foreign Medici Prize, published in forty countries and sold 1 million copies worldwide. He is also the author of a mountain notebook, “Le Garçon sauvage” (Zoé editions, 2016), travel stories, “Without ever reaching the summit” (Stock, 2019) and “Carnets de New York” ( Stocks, 2020).
