AFP

Gripping a sheep firmly between her legs, Vanesa Castillo holds its head with one hand while she tries to shear off its thick fleece with electric clippers. 

“It’s scary!” said Castillo, 37, slightly unnerved by her first attempt at sheep shearing at a school for shepherds in western Spain. 

“You have to pull the animal’s skin taut, really slowly, so you don’t cut it,” explained Jose Rivero, the professional sheep shearer giving the course. 

Sheep shearing is just one of the classes offered at the school in Casar de Caceres in rural Extremadura to counter the flight from the land that has left large swathes of inland Spain thinly populated.

Set up in 2015, the idea was “to bring in people who love the countryside”, said Enrique “Quique” Izquierdo, who runs the school. 

It aims to provide all the training and resources needed to create “a shepherd for the 21st century… with the most up-to-date methods in a sector where the traditional and the cutting-edge merge.”

Much of Spain’s sheep and goat farming is concentrated in rugged Extremadura. The school at Casar de Caceres is one of several across the country, the first set up in the northern Basque Country in 1997. 

– Tech and tradition –

“The traditional image of a shepherd wandering through the fields all day” doesn’t exist any more, said Jurgen Robledo, a vet who said the students are taught how to use many hi-tech tools including milk control programmes.

This year, 10 students are taking the five-month course which also includes hands-on experience of working with animals. 

Thibault Gohier, 26, is learning how to milk goats and to identify whether any of them are sick, which could affect the quality of their milk. 

“You need to use your fingertips as if they were your eyes,” said Felipe Escobero, who heads the farm where the school is based, as they feel a black goat’s mammary lymph nodes at the top of the udder.

When they’re healthy, “they should feel like an almond”, Escobero added. 

The course also covers financial matters and how to fill out certificates attesting to animal welfare or pesticide use. 

Completely free, it is funded by the Cooprado livestock farmers’ cooperative. 

Vet Robledo said modern hi-tech tools mean shepherds can now “measure the individual (milk) production of each animal.

“Such data can let a farmer see if production has dropped due to a subclinical mastitis infection by detecting a drop in production in a certain number of animals.” 

Unlike normal mastitis, such infections don’t cause any visible changes to the milk or udder appearance, making them difficult to detect, although they do affect the farmer’s bottom line by reducing milk production and quality.

– Different backgrounds –

Some students already work in farming and want to specialise, while others are completely new to the field, such as Vanesa Castillo, who is taking the course with her 17-year-old daughter Arancha Morales.

Originally employed at an old people’s home until it shut down two years ago, leaving her scrambling for work, her dream now is to have a sheep farm. 

“We’re looking for a way to bring home some money,” said her daughter, whose father can’t work after having an accident. 

Both women know they face an uphill battle, above all to find an affordable piece of land for their flock, a common problem across Extremadura. 

Thibault Gohier comes from a very different background.

A young Frenchman who loves animals and the countryside, his dream is to have “a bed and breakfast with a small farm attached with about 30 animals” in a mountainous area of France.

As the other students are learning to shear, El Ouardani El Boutaybi is feeding dozens of restless goats who are scampering around a pen. 

“I did the shepherds’ school and all the practical courses in June 2020… and then they took me on to work with them,” said the 20-year-old, who comes from the coastal town of Nador in northeastern Morocco. 

He got to Spain in 2017 after crossing the fence into the Spanish enclave of Melilla in North Africa, where he spent time in a centre for unaccompanied minors before being transferred to the peninsula. 

“I’ve got a future working in the countryside,” he said proudly.

Brazilian authorities on Wednesday arrested a man in connection with the disappearance of a British journalist and a local indigenous expert in the Amazon, police said, as calls mounted for officials to deliver answers on what happened to them.

As the search approached its fifth day, official information was scarce on the investigation into the fate of Dom Phillips, 57, and Bruno Pereira, 41, who disappeared early Sunday in the remote, jungle-covered Javari Valley in Brazil, near the border with Peru.

Brazilian police and military officers told a news conference they had questioned six people and arrested one. But they said it was unclear whether the suspect was directly linked to the case.

In the meantime, the authorities are pursuing “all lines of investigation,” and still hope to find the men alive, said lead investigator Alexandre Fontes.

Investigators said the arrested man was detained during a random stop-and-search operation in the region, when officers found him with drugs and illegally carrying 7.62-millimeter ammunition — a round typically used in assault rifles.

Witnesses reportedly saw the man trailing Phillips and Pereira’s boat as the pair made their way back to the small city of Atalaia do Norte after a research trip to an area known as Jaburu lake.

But “we have not established any connection between him and the (disappearance) for now,” the Amazonas state security secretary, General Carlos Alberto Mansur, told reporters.

– Murky waters –

Local indigenous activists say Phillips and Pereira received threats last week while working in the region, which has seen a surge of invasions of protected indigenous lands for illegal fishing, logging, gold mining and drug trafficking.

Pereira, a highly regarded expert on the region currently on leave from Brazilian indigenous affairs agency FUNAI, has been a target of death threats for his work fighting such invasions, including by helping indigenous communities set up their own patrols.

Investigators insisted they were doing their best in what Fontes called a “very complicated region,” criss-crossed by meandering rivers and reachable only by helicopter, small plane or boat.

A total of 250 officers are working on the rescue mission, including jungle operations experts sent by the army and rescue divers trained to work in murky waters, supported by two helicopters, three drones and 16 boats, they said.

Pressure has been mounting on President Jair Bolsonaro’s government, which faces accusations of failing to scale up the search fast enough in the far-flung region.

“We have reinforced the search operation since yesterday,” Justice Minister Anderson Torres wrote on Twitter.

– Celebrities, rights groups –

The case has drawn urgent appeals from leading media organizations and environmental and human-rights groups — joined by a growing list of high-profile figures including football legend Pele and current star Richarlison.

“The fight for the preservation of the Amazon Forest and the protection of indigenous groups belongs to all of us,” Pele posted on Instagram, along with a video from Tuesday of Phillips’s distraught wife choking back sobs as she pleaded with the Brazilian authorities to help.

“I join the many voices that make the appeal to intensify the search and to find them as soon as possible,” added the 81-year-old footballer, considered by many the greatest of all time.

Brazil and Everton striker Richarlison tweeted the same video.

“I ask the authorities, please, act urgently and do everything possible to find Dom Phillips and Bruno Pereira!” he wrote.

The plea also reached the Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles, where US President Joe Biden is meeting regional leaders this week, including a sit-down with Bolsonaro Thursday.

Activists mounted a giant screen on a truck that stopped at various landmarks, including the iconic Hollywood sign, with the message: “Where are Dom & Bruno?”

Spanish authorities are trying to find a brown bear and her cub which were separated after a brutal attack by a male bear that was caught on camera by two onlookers. 

The assault took place on a rocky mountainside in the northern Castilla y Leon region.

Although the mother bear managed to fight off her assailant, she was wounded and separated from her cub, footage released late on Tuesday showed. 

“We know that the mother bear is wounded and we don’t know anything else, the investigation is still open,” a source in the regional environment ministry told AFP.

In the footage, which runs for two-and-a-half minutes, the two adult bears fight for about 40 seconds before falling over the edge and crashing down the rocky hillside. 

The male bear, which was much larger than the female, died of injuries sustained in the fall, officials said, while the injured mother eventually got up and tried to find her cub, although it was not immediately clear whether they were reunited. 

In a post on Twitter, the regional environment ministry said  during the current season “mother bears often have to defend their cubs from attack by adult males”. 

During mating season, male bears often enter a frenzy of lust-fuelled cub killing with the aim of triggering oestrus — a period of sexual receptivity — in females who would otherwise only come on heat after raising their cubs to independence.

The behaviour is called sexually selected infanticide, and has also been observed in birds, bats, primates and big cats.

The mother “which was seen with two cubs several weeks ago, had already lost one of them, presumably after being attacked by this male or another,” the ministry said. 

Among the team searching for the wounded mother bear and her cub were vets, environmental wardens, bear conservation specialists and members of the Guardia Civil police. 

“As happens with other animals, male bears have have an instinct to kill cubs with the aim of mating again. They look for female bears with cubs that they can kill,” the head of the Brown Bear Foundation Guillermo Palomero told AFP. 

“The female enters an oestrus period two or three days after (the cub has been killed) so the male bear can copulate with her,” he said, describing such attacks as “very violent”. 

According to the foundation, 330 brown bears roam the Cantabrian mountains and another 70 are in the Pyrenees on the border between Spain and France. 

Canada unveiled Wednesday a national carbon emissions market to help it meet its climate goals by allowing cities, farmers and others to sell credits for CO2 reductions to heavier polluters.

Under the system, registered participants can generate one credit for each tonne of emissions they reduce or remove from the atmosphere.

Credits can then be sold to others in Canada to help them meet compliance obligations or emissions reductions goals.

“This system gives foresters, farmers, Indigenous communities, municipalities and others an opportunity to earn revenues by cutting pollution,” Environment Minister Stephen Guilbeault told a news conference.

Some environmental groups, however, called it a step backwards in the fight against climate change.

“Offsets don’t stop carbon from entering the atmosphere and warming the planet, but on paper they make the big polluters look good,” Greenpeace’s Salome Sane said in a statement.

Ottawa has pledged to reduce Canada’s carbon emissions by up to 45 percent below 2005 levels by 2030. 

But several independent reports have said the government is not doing enough to reach that target, and is lagging behind its G7 counterparts in slashing emissions.

Its new offset credit system, which allows credits to be generated from projects started after January 1, 2017, would allow landfills to sell credits for captured methane, for example.

Farmers could generate credits by sequestering more carbon in their soil by alternating fields in which they plant crops, or using feed for livestock that produces less burped gasses, while forestry firms could do the same by thinning diseased trees and managing brush to reduce wildfires.

“You can’t just go out and plant a tree in your front yard and get a credit,” an official told a briefing.

The emissions cuts must be new, verifiable, and permanent to qualify under the program, which will also include direct carbon capture from the air once those details are hammered out.

The federal system also prohibits trading of duplicate credits. The province of Quebec, for example, is already part of the US state of California’s cap and trade system known as the Western Climate Initiative.