Minsk says a Polish border fence hurts the European bison, an endangered species that nearly went extinct a century ago
The Polish government is undermining a century-long conservation project, which brought the European bison back from the brink of extinction, the Belarusian Foreign Ministry has said in a statement released by state media.
The message marked the upcoming centennial of a gathering in Paris, where environmentalists set out to restore the then-extinct wild population of the continent’s largest animal. In 1923 the International Conservation of Nature Congress in France launched a restitution program for bison in the Belovezhsky (Bialowieza) Forest, a vast woodland on what is now the Polish-Belarusian border.
The last freely-roaming member of the species was hunted down just six years later in the Caucasus mountains. Every European bison that currently exists traces its lineage to just 54 animals, who were kept in zoos and private…
