Juan Carlos Blanco (Valladolid, 65 years old) is an expert on wolves. As a child they scared him, like everyone else, but he saw The man and the earth, by Rodríguez de la Fuente, while having a snack on bread with chocolate and they began to attract him. He studied biology and thanks to a scholarship to study foxes (he did his thesis on a type of rabies they transmit) he stuck his nose into the world of mammals. Today he is the man the European Commission calls if he has any queries about wolves.
Ask. How are the wolves?
Response. They are social animals, they live in herds that are almost like a human group. There is a breeding pair that each year has about five cubs. Until they are two years old they usually stay in the herd and help feed the newborns. This is their main characteristic, they are a united pack with between eight and ten members. Although within the herds there is a certain mortality.
P. What do they die of?
R. Many times for hunting, although since last October it is prohibited. There are also crashes. And sometimes due to fights between them, due to competition with other tribes.
P. How did you begin to specialize in this animal?
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R. In the late 1980s I was asked to take the first wolf census. And I discovered that it is very difficult to count them.
P. How has its population changed since then?
R. Giving a figure would not be realistic. I can say that there are about 300 herds and that their population has expanded about 150 kilometers to the south, up to the Sierra de Guadarrama.
P. How have we humans changed their lives?
R. The wolves have changed our lives and we the lives of the wolves. At the time we started raising cattle they saw an easy food source there. And there came a time when the humans armed themselves to hunt the wolves. During the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century we exterminated them in many areas. Almost completely in the United States.
P. When did the alarms go off?
R. From 1970 voices began to emerge saying that it was not reasonable to exterminate the wolves. The first attempts to protect the species were made. In Spain until then we treated them as if they were cockroaches. We represented an uneducated Europe. In the most civilized countries they had already been exterminated.
P. Why did this change of look occur?
R. It has been emerging as human populations have settled in cities and the feeling of protection towards fauna has been increasing. The culmination of this feeling in Spain is October 2021, when the government strictly protected the species. Before, between 150 and 200 a year were hunted.
P. And now, is it impossible to hunt a wolf?
R. Sportingly, yes. What is not so clear is whether it can be killed to protect livestock. No autonomous community has killed wolves by control, but a few weeks ago the autonomous community of Cantabria has said that it is going to kill 10 wolves by damage control. In the very near future, Cantabria will be brought to court by environmental groups and the judge will decide.
P. How much did it cost to hunt a wolf?
R. Up to 18,000 for a wolf permit in the Sierra de la Culebra, the record, but in recent years it cost about 3,500 euros. It cost more to hunt a deer.
P. What do you think about this matter?
R. I believe that the protection of the wolf must be achieved through dialogue. Confrontation leads nowhere. And I’m not a fan of sport hunting.
P. In the Sierra de la Culebra there were several herds. Will the fire have affected them?
R. We think so. Their reaction to fire is to run away, but the fire occurred in the breeding stage and they were around a month old. I doubt they had time to escape.
P. Oh.
R. Well, keep in mind that the territory of each pack is about 100 square kilometers. For that mountain range, of course, the fire has been a disaster, but if we look at the wolves, at most we will have lost three packs, around 1% of the total.
P. How has our perception of this animal changed?
R. We have gone from demonizing it when we lived in cattle societies to beatifying them. Now it is almost impossible to find a story about a bad wolf.
P. Wolves, do they kill people?
R. In Europe in the last 40 years no one. And there are 17,000. In Alaska to one person and another in Canada. And there are about 80,000 specimens there. It is a minimum amount, minimum.
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