The wolf, one of the great European carnivores, has once again become master of the woods of the Old Continent. In the EU in 2023 there were around 20,300 of them, present in all 24 non-island states: in 23 countries there are herds that reproduce. They are missing only from Ireland, Cyprus and Malta, and they tend to increase. In 2012, eleven years earlier, the EU wolf population was estimated at 11,193 individuals. The presence of the wolf in Europe, therefore, has almost doubled over the course of a decade, but the species cannot yet be considered completely out of danger. It is the picture that emerges from a detailed report drawn up by the services of the European Commission (“The Situation of the Wolf in the European Union”) on input from the European Parliament, consulted by Adnkronos.
The report, signed by Juan Carlos Blanco and Kerstin Sundseth, was taken as the basis for the Commission's decision to propose to the Council to lower the protection status of the wolf from “strictly protected” to “protected”. That political decision was one of the first signs of the U-turn that Ursula von der Leyen's administration was preparing to make on some chapters of the Green Deal, under the pressure of farmers' discontent, which the EPP, the party that re-nominated for president, is particularly sensitive. The Popolari on these issues suffer competition from the right in the 'electoral precinct' of the agricultural-pastoral world, competition which also involved the wolf, so much so that in Brussels there were those who defined the futuristic Ppe-Id-Ecr alliance as the 'Wolf majority' (unlikely, at present), given the consensus on the need to lower its protection status.
In that decision some gossip wanted to see, without providing any supporting evidence, Ursula von der Leyen's 'revenge' for her beloved pony Dolly, who was allegedly mauled by a Lower Saxony wolf.
The very detailed report of the Commission's technicians attests that the number of wolves has increased in Europe in the last decade, but also highlights that, in the seven biogeographical regions of the EU (Pannonian, Continental, Alpine, Atlantic, Mediterranean, Black Sea and Boreal), according to the latest available assessment (2013-2018), its state of conservation was “favorable” only in one region, the Alpine region (which includes the Alps, Apennines, Pyrenees, Scandinavian Alps, Carpathians) while in the other six it was “unfavorable”. In the previous period (2007-2012), the conservation status of the large carnivore was favorable in two areas, the Alpine and the Atlantic, so things were better than they are now.
In 2023, however, according to the report, packs of wolves with reproductive capacity were detected in 23 EU countries, all those in continental Europe apart from Luxembourg, where they are only passing through. Italy, a country from which the large canid has never left, is first in Europe for the number of wolves, with 3,307 specimens (the estimates are subject to a certain degree of uncertainty, due among other things to the intrinsic difficulties of counting and the different national methods).
The second European 'home' of the wolf is another Latin country, Romania, with an estimated population of between 2,500 and 3,000 specimens. Followed by Spain (over 2,100), Poland (1,886), Germany (1,400) and Greece (1,020). Bulgaria estimates it has 2,712, but according to experts such as the Italian zoologist Luigi Boitani, an authority on the subject, these are very imprecise estimates; for the Commission, the estimate of 800-1,200 wolves provided in 2018 is closer to the truth. In recent years the wolf has returned on a permanent basis even in countries from which it had been absent for decades and which are highly anthropized, such as Holland and Belgium .
The wolf, the authors recall, it is part of the European natural ecosystem and plays an important role. In a highly anthropized territory like ours they cannot have the highly beneficial effect they have had in the large natural parks of North America: a case study is Yellowstone, where their reintroduction has mitigated the numerical explosion of the wapiti, multiplying, with a cascade effect, the health of the ecosystem and, ultimately, also the condition of the rivers and the beaver population. However, they can “limit the rates of increase and densities of wild ungulates”, thus reducing damage to wild vegetation and crops, as well as road accidents caused by collisions with large ungulates, such as deer and wild boars, which can be extremely dangerous. Above all, reduce the incidence of dangerous diseases for livestock, such as tuberculosis and African swine fevera real scourge for pig farms.
The authors of the report recall that results of research conducted in the field and in the laboratory “have demonstrated that, when wolves consume meat from wild boars positive for African swine fever, the virus does not survive passage through the intestinal tract”. Furthermore, in addition to killing sick animals, wolves “can limit the transmission of African swine fever by removing infected carrion.” The wolves,”by selecting the most vulnerable prey, such as diseased individuals, they can limit the incidence of diseases that wild ungulates can transmit to livestock,” the report notes. For example, in Southern Spain, where the wolf is extinct, various studies indicate the difficulty of containing tuberculosis in livestock, “due to the high rate of contagion among wild ungulates”. Wild boars in Southern Spain have very high rates of TB infection (52% in the Donana national park, 58% in the Sierra Morena, up to 98% in some game reserves). By contrast, in Galicia and Asturias in northwestern Spain, where there are “dense populations of wolves and much lower densities of wild ungulates, the prevalence of TB in wild boars was much lower, at 2.6%.”
AND' However, it is true that wolves also kill livestock, especially in areas where the population of wild ungulates is not very abundant. The herds have a marked predilection for sheep. In the EU, according to the report, they kill “at least 65,500 heads of livestock” every year, 73% sheep and goats, 19% cattle (mainly calves) and 6% horses and donkeys. The highest damage occurs in Spain, France and Italy (10-14 thousand animals killed every year in each country). In France the killing of sheep prevails, in Spain that of cattle, in the mountains of south-western Europe equines, in Sweden and Finland reindeer bred in the wild.
However, the report notes, considering that around 60 million sheep live in the EU, wolves kill only 0.065% of them every year.. “On a large scale – the experts write – the overall impact of wolves on livestock in the EU is very small”, but, be careful, “at a local level, the pressure on rural communities can be high in some areas”. Predation levels on livestock are “typically higher on livestock raised in the wild” and are “lower in areas where the wolf has never disappeared”, because local farmers have adapted by taking countermeasures.
However, the authors note, damage to livestock due to the growing presence of the wolf “is growing in the EU” and should not be underestimated, also because “they go beyond the merely economic dimension”. In some areas, livestock play a “key role” in preserving “highly biodiverse grasslands” and in the Mediterranean area they “contribute to the prevention of fires”. There is also the problem of predation against domestic animals, such as horses and hunting dogs: although “less common” than the killing of livestock, these episodes have a strong impact, even emotional, not to mention the fact that a trained hunting dog has a very high value for the hunter and is not immediately or easily replaceable. Wolves are very aggressive towards hunting dogs, which they perceive as competing predators on their territory. In addition, they sometimes attack guard dogs tied to the chain, to feed on them.
A pa problem not to be underestimated, the report underlines, is that, well known to experts, of 'confident wolves', i.e. animals that lose their natural distrust towards man, often because they are fed by humans, as if they were little dogs. Instead, they are wild animals, which can become dangerous: one of the only two cases of fatal attacks against humans that have occurred in North America in recent decades involved a 'confident' wolf, in Saskatchewan (Canada), who was fed by men and who no longer feared them. Cases of non-lethal attacks by confident wolves have also occurred in Europe. in particular in Germany, Poland and also in Abruzzo, where last summer a she-wolf bit some people on the beach of Vasto. In these cases, mitigation actions can be effective (such as driving away using rubber bullets, to scare the animal).
While the risk of attacks on humans in Europe is “very low”, it is not “zero”, the report warns, underlining that these ancestral fears are often exploited by the enemies of the wolf, sometimes with the involuntary complicity of the media. The case of Celia Hollingworth, a retired British teacher whose remains were found in a forest in Thrace, in north-eastern Greece, in the summer of 2017, is exemplary: on the web you can only find articles that attribute her death to the wolf, but the report recalls that, in reality, she was mauled by a pack of feral dogs, which are much more dangerous than wolves because they do not fear man. “Although wolves can attack humans – explain the authors – in the last 40 years no fatal attacks against people have been recorded in Europe. To further reduce the already small risk that wolves pose to human safety, specific protocols have been developed to address the problem of courageous and/or food-conditioned wolves.”
There presence of the wolf can also be transformed into a resource, as has already happened for the brown bear in some areas of the EU. “Wolf-related tourism – experts note – can create income in rural areas and also lead to greater tolerance towards wolves at a local level. Tourism can also educate visitors about the ecology of wolves and how to coexist with them, raising awareness and promoting conservation efforts. However, wolf-related tourism should be adequately planned and regulated, to prevent any negative impacts on wolves.”
The Commission's decision to propose lowering the protection status of the wolfalthough states can already, under the Habitats Directive, intervene with a good margin of discretion in the event of problems, It also contrasts with the unpopularity of this measure among the general public: according to the data collected by the Commission in 2023, the experts recall, “over 70% of those interviewed expressed their opinion in favor of maintaining the protection status of the wolf, compared to 29% in favor of reducing the protection status”. Perhaps this is why the von der Leyen Commission decided to announce the request to downgrade the protection status of the wolf on 20 December last, when the media in Brussels were busy 'covering' the reform of the Stability Pact.
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