A row has broken out over an Algarve hotel’s use of birds of prey to control seagulls.
PAN, the People-Animals-Nature party has filed a complaint with the authorities, denouncing the situation over social media and sending out press releases.
In the hotseat is Porches’ Viking Pestana Hotel.
PAN explains its “indignation” for what it terms “a cruel act without any concern for animal wellbeing”.
According to the environmental party hotel guests saw an eagle attack a seagull leaving it wounded and “likely to die an agonising death”, though it managed to fly away.
The story stresses: “There are other non-violent forms of controlling seagull populations without putting the seagulls’ own lives at risk and using other animals abusively for this effect”.
But Pedro Coelho of Man of Birds, the company contracted by Hotel Viking Pestana, says this is all very much a ‘storm in a teacup’, and a political storm at that.
Man of Birds’ falcons and owls are not trained to kill. They are trained simply to “scare”, he said, doubting the account about the badly injured bird that ‘managed to fly away’ before ‘dying an agonising death’.
“There has never been any kind of attack on seagulls”, he told us.
But the use of birds of prey to control seagull populations – or indeed any kind of bird over-population – is the “most ecological you could find”, used throughout the world – particularly by airports, he guaranteed.
Man of Birds has contracts with a number of hotels in the Algarve, and elsewhere, Coelho added. It is not simply hired to assist Hotel Viking Pestana.
Pedro Coelho also explained that one of the reasons the Algarve has such a bad seagull problem is because landfill sites do not use his company’s services.
“Landfill sites elsewhere in the country use this form of control for seagulls. It works. In the Algarve, for whatever reason, they don’t, and this leads to the high numbers of seagulls that we see everywhere”.
The problem, he explained, is that seagulls feed on rubbish, and transmit diseases.
PAN’s preoccupation with the Pestana Viking is therefore taking the issue down the wrong road, in Coelho’s opinion.
As for the party’s belief that seagulls are or could be being killed, this is apparently nonsense.
“We have no licence for hunting, and there cannot be any kind of hunting”, he reiterated. “The birds are trained to eat from our hands. They do not see seagulls as food”.
Hotel Viking Pestana’s director Ricardo Santos confirmed the hotel’s contract with Man of Birds, saying he could not see what all the fuss is about.
PAN however is citing European legislation that recognises the “sentience of animals and obliges states to adopt policies that take animals’ wellbeing into account”.
natasha.donn@algarveresident.com
