It should protect livestock against attacks by the wolf advancing in the Netherlands, but the so-called wolf fence in Friesland has not made any progress five months after the first pile.
VVD celebrity Hans Wiegel was taken out of the stable at the end of June to drive the first pile of the wolf fence amid great interest from the press. At the same time, there was also a lot of criticism of the project from nature organizations and political parties. That attention and criticism now seems to be costing the project, at least for the time being.
“We had an agreement with five farmers for a 2.5-kilometre fence”, chairman Jehan Bouma of the Wolvenhek Fryslân Foundation told this site. ,,But after the first pole there was such a huge media storm, everyone had an opinion about it. As a result, one of the farmers got cold feet a week before we were to start. You need them all anyway, otherwise it won’t work.”
The result is a shabby piece of fencing of only 25 meters near the Frisian village of Boijl. Not a wolf to be scared. In fact, Natuurmonumenten expects that the number of wolves will only increase in the coming years. And with it, the number of sheep killed by wolves will also increase. In 2020, more than double the number of sheep was killed by wolves in the Netherlands compared to 2019: from 119 to 291. Never before have there been so many.
Criticism
The purpose of the 2.5-kilometer-long fence was to show as a test how such a fence would work and what it would mean for other animals, explains Bouma. “Other wildlife is not disturbed. We could have demonstrated this with wildlife cameras, but that possibility has been lost to us.”
According to the foundation, a fence of at least 150 kilometers is needed to actually keep the wolf out of the meadows and to protect the sheep, which runs from the IJsselmeer to the Lauwersmeer and where the nature reserves on the border with Drenthe and Groningen are kept out. In order to still achieve this, the foundation will try to convince politicians of the necessity of the fence in the coming period. “There will be so many wolves from Germany in the coming years, that will be untenable,” says Bouma. “We have now raised enough money through crowdfunding to place a test fence, but we need support and permission.”
Convince
Nature organizations are meanwhile critical of the plans. They state that the Court of Justice of the EU has already ruled several times that highly protected species such as the wolf should be able to decide for themselves where they settle. The Faunabescherming, a Dutch foundation that defends the interests of wild animals, also called the plan illegal and unworkable.
The Party for the Animals had previously asked parliamentary questions about the wolf fence. The party calls the fence ‘desirable both ecologically and practically’, because this would cause fragmentation of nature areas.
Watch our news videos in the playlist below:
Free unlimited access to Showbytes? Which can!
Log in or create an account and never miss a thing from the stars.
#Media #storm #criticism #cost #controversial #wolf #fence #Friesland #time