Wolves have adapted swiftly and surely to human-dominated landscapes. But people are struggling to adjust to the wolves. The concentration of packs, von der Leyen declared when announcing the commission’s review of wolf protection laws, “has become a real danger for livestock and potentially also for humans”.
In December, the commission proposed to reduce the wolf’s status under the Bern Convention from “strictly protected” to “protected” in order to introduce “further flexibility” – potentially enabling wolves to be hunted and populations reduced across the EU.
Many populist politicians across Europe hope that talking up the threat of the wolf – alongside tough measures to tackle it – will win support ahead of next summer’s elections to the European parliament.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
It was a mild, windless night, sometime before dawn on 1 September 2022, when a large grey wolf trotted out of the woods beside Beinhorn, a hamlet of old barns and graceful wooden houses in the German state of Lower Saxony.
Many populist politicians across Europe hope that talking up the threat of the wolf – alongside tough measures to tackle it – will win support ahead of next summer’s elections to the European parliament.
On the other side, wolf-haters claim that this ruthless carnivore’s return has been naively championed by the tofu-munching wokerati who know nothing of the countryside, elevate the welfare of animals above people, and inflict misery upon farmers, hunters and country folk.
For all the wolf’s wild symbolism, it is thriving in human-dominated landscapes: the intensively farmed countryside and even suburban areas of eastern Germany with human population densities higher than the city of Newcastle.
According to Raoul Reding, the association’s biologist who oversees the meticulous recording of populations, we are witnessing an unprecedented experiment: “It’s never happened before, anywhere in the world, that such large carnivores would settle such densely inhabited human areas as we have here in Germany.”
Vice-president Jörn Ehlers hands me two stickers: one depicts a vicious-looking wolf with a sheep in its mouth barred with a red line; the other reads: IF YOU DON’T LIKE FARMING, STOP EATING.
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