Thin Black Line
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http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-2432765,00.html
How a curse could save White Bambi
From David Crossland in Berlin
Hunters in Germany are resisting a call to kill a rare albino deer buck dubbed White Bambi, which is gaining national fame in a country still mourning the killing of Bruno the Bavarian brown bear in July.
Günter Giese, the president of the Saxony Hunting Federation, said: “The white deer is a mutation. It does not belong in the wild; it should be shot.”
Wildlife experts agree that the animal should be taken out of circulation because it could damage the gene pool of the deer population when it mates. But hunters in the 900-hectare (2,200 acre) deer range in the Erzgebirge mountains of eastern Germany, where the deer has been sighted, are refusing to shoot it. “We who hunt in this area agree that the deer should stay alive because we enjoy seeing it and because it is pretty,” Gottfried Meier, 60, a hunter who said he had seen the deer almost every day since May, told The Times. “A white deer is something different.”
Herr Meier added that many hunters believed in the curse said to befall any hunter who kills a white deer: that he or a member of his family shall die within a year.
Legend has it that Franz Ferdinand, the Austrian Archduke, fell victim to the curse after shooting a white stag in the autumn of 1913. Less than a year later he was assassinated in Sarajevo, triggering the First World War.
Herr Meier said that the deer, which was ten days old when he first spotted it, was wandering round with a herd of brown deer. He said it was the first albino he had seen in 30 years. Only one in 10,000 deer has the genetic trait that makes it an albino. The case recalls the fate that befell Bruno, the young brown bear that wandered from the Italian Alps into Bavaria in the spring.
It made worldwide headlines by evading attempts to catch it as it walked through villages and ate sheep, stole honey from beehives, broke into chicken coops and famously sat on a guinea pig. Bruno was finally shot by hunters in July after the Bavarian environment ministry declared that it had become a danger to the population in its seven-week rampage.
The killing sparked nationwide mourning and the Government and local hunters received death threats. There were even reports of holidaymakers cancelling trips to Bavaria in protest. Bild, Germany’s best-selling daily newspaper, ran a front page headline yesterday saying: “New Bruno case? Hunt for White Bambi.” The Saxony environment ministry, keen to avoid any negative PR, is backing Bambi. “As a rarity and natural phenomenon, it should be allowed to live,” a ministry spokeswoman said.
