Grave-plundering wild hamsters of Vienna have scored a victory in Europe’s highest court as judges ruled that developers must leave their burrows and surrounding areas undisturbed even if the animals have moved out.
The European hamster is found across a broad swathe of Eurasia, stretching from Belgium in the west to the Altai mountains of Russia in the east, and was once considered a common farmland pest.
In recent decades, however, its numbers in western and central Europe have declined to the point where it was added to the list of critically endangered species last year. Some experts believe it may die out in the wild within 30 years.
Driven out of the countryside by habitat loss, the hamsters have begun to move into cities, with a particular stronghold in Vienna, the Austrian capital.
Their numbers have been stabilised by conservation measures and they are concentrated in the city’s southerly tenth district, including in the Meidling cemetery.
Two years ago Sir David Attenborough featured the cemetery’s hamsters in an episode of the BBC documentary series Seven Worlds, One Planet, where they could be seen eating memorial candles and petals from wreaths laid beside graves.
While the rodents are generally popular with the Viennese, some have come to regard them as a nuisance and there have been isolated reports of attempted poisonings.
One group for whom the hamsters are an occasionally unwelcome presence is the city’s developers, who are banned from damaging their breeding sites.
In one legal wrangle that went to the European Court of Justice (ECJ) in Luxembourg, the city council fined an employee of a construction firm that had cleared the topsoil from a site containing at least two wild hamster burrows, allegedly destroying the entrances.
The man, identified only as IE, appealed, arguing that the burrows had been abandoned and their fundamental structure had not been damaged during the work.
However, the ECJ ruled that the hamsters’ breeding sites “must enjoy protection for as long as is necessary in order for that animal species successfully to reproduce”. The judges also said the breeding sites included not only the burrows but the areas around them.
This means that the burrows and their surroundings cannot be disturbed so long as there is a reasonable chance the hamsters might return to breed. It is now down to the Viennese authorities to determine whether the hamsters are likely to come back.
