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Clawing Back from Extinction

The Iberian lynx is no longer an endangered species.

Gil Pires
Simply Wild
4 min readOct 10, 2024

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Photo by Staffan Widstrand | Rewilding Europe (2020).

Larger than a house cat but smaller than a Labrador, the Iberian lynx was at one point in history a creature of myth. Only a few dozen people could actually claim to have seen one in real life. But they were a stubborn bunch and thanks to them the Iberian lynx is no longer endangered.

When two infectious disease outbreaks nearly decimated wild rabbit populations in Europe in the 20th century, entire ecosystems collapsed.

In southern Europe, the Iberian lynx (Lynx pardinus) was one of the species most affected by these outbreaks, since they rely on rabbits for nearly 90% of their diet. To add fuel to the fire, they were regarded as pests by farmers and were aggressively hunted in the middle of the 20th century — with the support of the Spanish government.

These practices continued in the form of poaching, long after the species became protected in the 1960s by the CITES Treaty. As a consequence, the lynx, which once could be easily found in the Iberian shrublands of Portugal, Spain and southern France, saw its population reduced to less than a hundred individuals by the 1990s.

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Gil Pires
Gil Pires

Written by Gil Pires

Junior Consultant | MSc in Biotechnology

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