The death knell sounds for European wolves as a majority of countries back the proposal to lower their protection
EU ambassadors voted today in favour of the Commission’s proposal to downgrade the wolf’s status from “strictly protected” to “protected” under the Bern Convention.
Only Spain and Ireland voted against.
A final vote will take place tomorrow after which the Bern Convention must be notified.
This decision sounds a clarion call for the mass culling of wolves across Europe, with countries free to decide quotas, methods and timeframes, provided the wolf’s “favourable” conservation status is maintained.
The wolf’s conservation status is deemed unfavourable in 6 of Europe’s 9 biogeographical regions.
It is only favourable in the Alpine region, but here too wolves are not out of the woods and the culling of local populations to below the minimum viable population, as Switzerland is currently doing, risks the loss of genetic diversity and gene flow.
To which must be added the threat of habitat fragmentation.
And illegal killing, which culling has shown to worsen.
Culling can also worsen the very livestock predation which wolves are increasingly being blamed for by disrupting wolf societies and increasing their reproductive rates, which in turn result in more inexperienced young wolves.
Yet wolves prefer to feed on wild prey and the number of sheep they do kill annually represents just 0.065% of the total size of Europe’s flocks.
But there is nothing scientific, fair or indeed democratic about this decision.
Four decades of conservation success will be undone at the stroke of a pen at the behest of a small vocal minority spearheaded by farming and hunting lobbies.
The wolf is the obvious scapegoat, warped by human mythology, exaggeration and fairy tales into a cruel, deceitful super-predator with an eclectic taste for old grandmothers and little pigs by the trio.
How can we shake free of the fear of the wolf as the Devil’s familiar instilled in us by the Catholic Church in the late, dark Middle Ages or Matthew 7:15’s warning to: “Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves.”
How can our wolves ever shake free from the hirsute and horrible image of the lunatic, bloodthirsty werewolf we have tarred them with?
It wasn’t always so. Go back some 20,000 years and early humans and wolves hunted the same prey using force of numbers to bring them down. We fed at each others kills and antagonism gradually gave way to cooperation. Wolves crept out of the darkness and morphed into Canis lupus familiaris long before sheep, cows or horses were domesticated.
But when humans began keeping livestock around 8,000 BC, persecution of the wolf began in earnest… until reason, public opinion and legislation forced a change.
Now we are resurrecting old myths and prejudices and killing wolves again.
At the eleventh hour we are turning back the clock.
And turning our backs on wolves.
Apex predator population is a key indicator of an ecosystem’s health. The benefits of their services permeate down to the agrarian human populations who share their space with these creatures. Nzatu Food Group supports indigenous communities in mitigating human-wildlife conflict without hunting predators to extinction, to live in harmony with nature and in improving the overall wellbeing of an interconnected system.