The mouflon that surprised yesterday to a good number of drivers in the El Carretón road, in Arafowill be slaughtered in a few days in accordance with the protocol of the Biodiversity area of the Department of Natural Management and Security of the Cabildo, as it is a kind of exotic-invasive fauna. The Gesplan company, entrusted by the Cabildo for these matters, took charge of the animal this morning and moved it to the zoo control facilities to proceed to “euthanize”a term used according to veterinary control and animal welfare criteria.
It all started at four in the afternoon on Tuesday. Before the astonished gaze of the drivers, an adult mouflon (5 or 6 years old, according to its antlers), weighing about 150 kilos, runs down the road on the TF-281 that joins La Hidalga with the TF-1 in the area of El Carretón, in the municipality of Arafo.
At first, it was thought of as a male goat until once it decided to stop at the Cepsa gas station and it was verified that it was a mouflon, whose habitat since the end of the 1960s is Las Cañadas del Teide, when it was introduced here for hunting big game. Once tied, and thanks to the efforts of the mayor Juan Ramón Martín, the animal was deposited in the nearby corral that the goatherd Aítor has in the area, after ruling out that the ‘bug’ could belong to the El Carretón Ecological Farm.
No one knew where that huge animal had come from. Of course, impossible that he had come down from Izaña through Chivisaya. In addition, no one would dare to show ownership, because its possession is penalized, as it is an “exotic-invasive species” that cannot be kept in pens or farms, although everyone recognizes that in Tenerife there are those who have them and even They mate with sheep. It’s more, Anthony Porraspresident of the Tenerife Hunting Federation, and hunter of mouflons in some raids, recounts that “there are those who take some baifo with them during the breeding season and raise them hidden together, especially sheep”, he comments.
