Preservation
The populations of Capra pyrenaica have decreased significantly over the last centuries. This can be due to a combination of contributing factors such as great hunting pressure, agricultural development and habitat deterioration. Around 1890, one of the subspecies, C. pyrenaica lusitanica, also known as the Portuguese ibex, became extinct from its range in the Portuguese Sierra de Geres and Galicia. By the mid-nineteenth century, another of the four subspecies, the Pyrenean ibex, came from the French Pyrenees and the Pyrenean subspecies became extinct in January 2000, when the last adult female died in the Ordesa National Park. There are also a series of threats in an effort towards ibex conservation; such as population overabundance, disease, and potential competition with domestic livestock and other ungulates, along with the negative effects of human disturbance through tourism and hunting. Until recently, ibexes from Southern Spain have also become exposed to diseases and outbreaks like sarcoptic mange. This disease, potentially fatal for infected individuals, unequally affects males and females and it limits the reproductive investment of individuals. Scabies has become the main destabilizing factor in many populations of Iberian ibex.
Read more about this topic: Spanish Ibex
Famous quotes containing the word preservation:
“There is something to be said for jealousy, because it only designs the preservation of some good which we either have or think we have a right to. But envy is a raging madness that cannot bear the wealth or fortune of others.”
—François, Duc De La Rochefoucauld (1613–1680)
“I do seriously believe that if we can measure among the States the benefits resulting from the preservation of the Union, the rebellious States have the larger share. It destroyed an institution that was their destruction. It opened the way for a commercial life that, if they will only embrace it and face the light, means to them a development that shall rival the best attainments of the greatest of our States.”
—Benjamin Harrison (1833–1901)
“Men are not therefore put to death, or punished for that their theft proceedeth from election; but because it was noxious and contrary to men’s preservation, and the punishment conducing to the preservation of the rest, inasmuch as to punish those that do voluntary hurt, and none else, frameth and maketh men’s wills such as men would have them.”
—Thomas Hobbes (1579–1688)