Science takes a back seat in the war on wolves
Species conservation is supposed to be led by science. But critics say it is getting sidelined in the battle over wolves' protection status.
Switzerland fired the official starting gun on a five-month-long wolf cull on 1 September. Several cantons have applied to kill young wolves and their elders, as well as to wipe out numerous whole packs. If approved by the federal authorities, the cantons will be able to commence with the slaughter, thanks to controversial legislative changes that allow for a dramatic reduction of the country’s fragile wolf population.
Switzerland’s actions are illustrative of a wider trend. Previously hunted to near extinction in Europe, wolf populations have rebounded in recent decades. But as wolf numbers have crept up, the same demonisation and persecution that has plagued the species for eternity has crept back in.
However, there are now obstacles to killing the maligned canine, not least the legal protections that have helped to pull wolves back from the brink. So the current war on wolves is being fought on many fronts, with science, democracy, and the iconic canines, all getting hammered in the process.
Wolf protections
Switzerland’s wolf cull has been made possible through revisions to the country’s hunting law. The Swiss parliament’s primary rationale for the changes is to limit damage to Alpine farming, namely to tackle wolf predation of farmed animals, mainly sheep.
Among other things, the changes permit cantons to ‘preventively regulate’ the keystone species, where approved by the federal government. This means that targeted wolves have not necessarily shown themselves to pose any threat but they are being dispatched regardless. These preventive culls started last year and autopsy results of killed wolves in the canton Valais showed none of them had predated sheep, Blick reported.
Due to the pre-crime nature of the wolf persecution and its scale, Switzerland may be in danger of violating its obligations under several international agreements, including the Bern Convention. This risk was outlined in a consultation response endorsed by over 70 organisations after the government launched a consultation on the legislative changes.
The Bern Convention is a regional conservation agreement that most countries on the European continent are parties to, along with some African nations. It lists the wolf as an Appendix II species, meaning it is strictly protected. As a result, parties to the agreement – including EU countries and non-EU nations like Switzerland – should prohibit the deliberate disturbance, capture, and killing of wolves, as well as abide by other habitat-related prohibitions.
Persecution is permissible in some exceptional and conditional circumstances under the agreement. Most relevant to wolves, countries can use lethal measures to “prevent serious damage” to farmed animals. But this is only permissible where there are no satisfactory alternatives and the measures do not threaten the survival of the wolf population.
Downlist the wolf
Over the years, Switzerland has repeatedly tried to persuade Bern Convention parties to downgrade the wolf’s protection status from Appendix II to Appendix III, which would soften the rules on exploitation of the species.
The European badger offers an example of the level of protection afforded to Appendix III species. The UK is a party to the Bern Convention and it has been systemically killing badgers in England for over a decade now, ostensibly in the name of protecting farming. So far, successive governments have permitted the extermination of over 230,000 badgers. Wildlife organisations lodged a formal complaint with the Bern Convention about the mass slaughter in 2019. The case is currently on stand-by.
Towards the end of last year, Switzerland’s chances of achieving its goal to lower the wolf’s protection status to that of the European badger were boosted when a powerful entity called for the same.
In September 2023, the European Commission (EC) announced that it was preparing a proposal on modifying wolf protections. It said this was in response to the adoption of a 2022 resolution in the European Parliament, which contained an expression of support for downgrading the wolf’s protection status.
The EC is the executive body of the EU. Its responsibilities include proposing new laws and policies for member states to consider adopting. Ursula von der Leyen, who belongs to the centre-right European People’s Party, has held the position of EC president since 2019. As the Guardian reported, Von der Leyen’s pet pony was killed by a wolf in 2022, while being kept in a paddock that lacked the necessary fencing to safeguard her from wolves.
The EC called for input from communities, scientists, and other interested parties on its incoming wolf proposal. Although the commission intended this to be a data collection exercise about wolf populations and their impacts, people feel so strongly about the issue that they instead bombarded the EC with opinions. An overwhelming amount of respondents – over 70 percent – said they wanted existing strict protections for the apex predators to remain in place.
Despite this, the EC released its plan in December, calling for wolves to be downgraded from strictly protected (Appendix II) to protected (Appendix III) under the Bern Convention. Its apparent reasoning for this is that the wolf population has significantly grown in the last two decades and, in turn, the impact of wolves on human activities, such as farming, have increased too.
The Council of the EU is now considering whether to adopt the EC proposal. As Politico reported, a decision should be made this autumn as a Bern Convention meeting in December has “created a natural deadline” for the deliberations.
The publication also reported that Von der Leyen has lobbied hard for the EC proposal to be adopted, according to EU insiders it spoke to.
It’s all in the timing
In the EU, the wolf is protected under both the Bern Convention and legislation called the Habitats Directive. Simply put, EU countries implement what the Bern Convention demands through the Habitats Directive, in relation to protections for wildlife, with some variation due to each country’s circumstances.
The European Environmental Bureau’s (EEB) Sergiy Moroz tells The 4 Percent that the timing of the EC proposal to downgrade wolf protections was nonsensical because it came ahead of a scheduled Habitats Directive assessment of protected species, which is taking place in 2025.
Moroz says that countries have to report on their wolf populations as part of this assessment, so it would logically be the best time to consider whether changes to the species’ status are warranted.
But the proposal made sense in terms of politics as the EU was gearing up for its mid-2024 bloc-wide elections. Political groups on the right of the spectrum had pushed for the wolf to feature prominently in their election campaigns, according to Moroz.
Indeed, following the proposal’s release, Moroz described it as an “early Christmas present” from the EC to “von der Leyen’s political family as it seeks to position itself as a defender of farming and rural communities ahead of the European elections.”
Proposal not supported by science
However, when it comes to wildlife conservation under the Bern Convention and the Habitats Directive, political priorities are not meant to dictate the direction of travel, science is.
To this end, the EC has carried out in-depth analysis on wolves in the EU. Although this informed the EC proposal, Von der Leyen called for such a probe within weeks of her pony being killed, according to Politico.
The analysis pointed to overall increased numbers of wolves across the EU, estimating their numbers at around 20,000 in 2023, compared to approximately 11,000 in 2012. But it warned that the precision of EU countries’ population estimates vary greatly, as does the quality of monitoring.
Furthermore, the analysis highlighted that the conservation status of the wolf in different countries varies, with the species facing enduring threats in many places. These threats include illegal killing, traffic accidents, and hybridisation due to interbreeding with dogs.
In other words, although the wolf could be said to be recovering in Europe, it does not appear to be on course to be securely recovered in the immediate or near future, certainly not on an EU-wide level.
Moroz says the analysis “provides no justification for lowering the protection status” of wolves. Similarly, several environment-focused nonprofits, including EEB, argued that the EC report and other evidence provides “no scientific basis” for lowering the wolf’s protection status in an open letter in May. They stressed that further efforts are required for the wolf “to reach a favourable conservation status across the region.“
Wolf killing doesn’t necessarily protect farmed animals
In their open letter, the organisations also said the EC analysis concluded that “allowing wolf hunting does not reduce depredations,” partly because other wolves take over the territory of slaughtered individuals.
The EC report indicated that the exception to this would be where wolves are killed with “such intensity,” they are barely present across vast ranges. Simply put, for wolf killing to have a chance of working, it appears the species has to pushed back towards extinction.
Doing this would contravene the Habitats Directive and is “socially rejected” by much of the European public, the analysis stressed. Needless to say, intensively killing wolves across large areas would also violate the Bern Convention rules regarding the species.
The report did highlight that targeting wolves who have a tendency to kill farmed animals may have some success at reducing predations. Nonetheless, it is difficult to target specific individuals and the impacts are uncertain.
In addition to all this, killing wolves to avoid predation of farmed animals appears to be disproportionate to the threat they pose. Wolf predation, for instance, affects 0.065 percent of the EU’s 60 million-strong sheep each year, the EC analysis said. It described the overall impact of predation on the bloc’s farmed animals as “very small.”
Similarly, sheep deaths due to large carnivores, mostly wolves, during the summer grazing period in Switzerland amount to around 6 percent of the total, according to a 2020 report by Kora, a carnivore ecology and wildlife management foundation. It says disease and accidents cause far more sheep fatalities, with wolves being a “factor of minor importance numerically.”
The aforementioned response to the Swiss consultation cited higher predation figures for the period 2020-2023, at around 20 percent of the total annual mortality for sheep. Still, it too argued that this pales in comparison to sheep deaths from other hazards.
Needless to say, humans are the biggest sheep killer in Europe. In the first quarter of 2022 alone, EU countries slaughtered some 6.5 million sheep, according to EuroMeat News.
Persecution is unnecessary
On a local level, the impact of wolf attacks on farmed animals can be higher than bloc-or country-wide figures indicate. But many European countries provide compensation or subsidies to farmers for such losses.
Additionally, there are various prevention methods that can be implemented to limit the problem of predation. These include installing predator-proof fencing or having guardian dogs and human shepherds watch over farmed animals.
Lucie Wuethrich is a prominent campaigner for wolves and forests who penned the consultation response to the Swiss government. She tells The 4 Percent that prevention methods have been used in the country, with good success. The impact of these alternatives is evident in the changing ratio of farmed animals killed per wolf, she says.
Each wolf was on average killing 42 farmed animals in Switzerland back in 2000. By 2023, this had been reduced to four farmed animals per wolf, despite the predator’s population increasing, as WWF has highlighted.
Wuethrich further stresses that “livestock predation correlates most strongly with the non-implementation of protection measures.” Indeed, newly released figures show that 65 percent of predation in one canton in 2023 was of inadequately protected farmed animals, she recently highlighted on LinkedIn.
Despite the success of prevention methods, however, the Swiss government made a “sudden and unintelligible” move in January, Wuethrich explains. The government announced it was terminating the Federal Office for the Environment’s (FOEN) farmed animal guardian dog breeding program and withdrawing federal funding.
In short, the evidence is clear that protection measures are more effective at safeguarding farmed animals than killing wolves. But the success of these measures depends on politicians and farmers embracing them, rather than undermining them.
Balancing different interests already possible
The EC analysis also pointed to another nonsensical aspect of the push for downgrading wolves’ protections by highlighting that countries already have significant wiggle room under the species’ existing status.
Some parties to the Bern Convention, for instance, entered reservations regarding the legal status of the wolf in their countries. As a result, they do not treat the species as strictly protected. Additionally, exactly how the Bern Convention requirements have been applied in EU countries, through the Habitats Directive, varies according to nations’ particular circumstances. Moreover, the rules of both the Bern Convention and the Habitats Directive come with exceptions, which can be utilised where necessary.
What this means in practice is that European countries are already able to ‘control’ wolves to varying extents. As the EC analysis put it, it is possible to “balance different interests” under the existing rules, including by member states utilising exceptions to “address the specific challenges they are currently facing in relation to the wolf population.”
Undoing decades of progress
The wolf’s strictly protected status does, however, set a relatively high bar for what persecution is permissible. Crucially, it also puts countries at risk of legal challenges when they fail to abide by the rules.
Recent judgments illustrate this, with the Court of Justice of the European Union determining that regional wolf hunting is not permissible in Austria and Spain due to the species’ national conservation status.
The Swedish Carnivore Association also has an ongoing complaint lodged with the EC over that country’s licensed hunting, i.e. trophy hunting, of wolves. Recently, Sweden has also come under fire for approving the trophy hunting of almost 500 bears, another species that is strictly protected under the Bern Convention. Although the hunt was due to run from 21 August to 15 October, it’s likely to last barely three weeks. This is because zealous hunters had killed around 420 bears by 2 September, according to Sweden’s Environmental Protection Agency.
As the carnivore protection project Sweden’s Big Five has highlighted, the Swedish government now appears keen to cut its wolf population in half. The Swedish Carnivore Association has warned that this would threaten the species’ long-term survival in the country.
Sweden’s Big Five summed up the situation, warning that “50 years of slow come-back progress of the wolf in Sweden is presently being undone at an alarming speed.”
Switzerland intends to go even further. As Environmental Rights Review has outlined, its plan permits reducing the wolf population by up to 70 percent.
More specifically, Wuethrich explains that the new hunting legislation allows for the country’s 35 wolf packs – a third of which are transboundary – to be whittled down to 12. This contradicts the “minimum viable population of 20 packs” that the FOEN itself set, she says.
The plan “risks being devastating and undoing decades of progress,” Wuethrich warns.
The International Union for Conservation of Nature Species Survival Commission’s (IUCN SSC) Canid Specialist Group agrees. In a letter to the Swiss government, the wolf experts objected to its “unscientific” management plan and said a reduction of wolf packs to 12 “is far below any estimates given for a minimum viable population of around 20 packs, and even this estimate should be considered as speculative.”
Sending the wrong message
The IUCN SSC Canid Specialist Group implored the Swiss authorities to change tack. It called on the country to embrace a “science-based management approach that fosters coexistence between people and nature,” the implication being that the Swiss authorities are effectively rejecting coexistence currently.
Similarly, the message that the EC is sending out to the world through its proposal is that “coexistence is not working,” says Moroz. This risks damaging Europe’s credibility in international fora like the Convention of Biological Diversity, he warns, as it contravenes the aims of the agreement.
The EC declined to provide comment to The 4 Percent on the various controversies surrounding its proposal.
However, the push for relaxing restrictions on wolf persecution, rather than focusing on strengthening coexistence measures, is inkeeping with what is happening on the other side of the Atlantic.
US lawmakers passed the Trust the Science Act in the House in April, though it still needs to pass in the Senate. The Orwellian law would effectively circumvent the scientific process that the US’ Endangered Species Act (ESA) has for deciding whether to remove species’ protections and allow lawmakers to strip the gray wolf of its ESA protections instead.
Moroz says there are parallels between the US and Europe, in terms of how they are approaching the wolf issue and environmental matters more broadly.
“We've really seen in the last couple of years the return of almost Trump politics in the EU's decision making,” he says.
This is evident in how “the wolf has been made a symbol of culture wars” by the political right, Moroz explains, and in some of the moves made during the Council of the EU’s deliberations on the EC proposal.
For instance, some countries have tried to shoehorn farming interests into decision-making by calling for a group involving both environmental and agricultural officials to have competency in drawing conclusions on the issue. This was rejected by a majority of member states as species protection is the exclusive remit of environmental authorities to decide on.
In other words, there have been attempts to “change the character of discussions from technical to political” for an issue that is scientific, i.e. technical, at its core, says Moroz.
Alternative facts
The Trumpian nature of the European debate over wolves is perhaps most apparent in the ‘alternative facts’ involved in it. Wuethrich says politicians and lobby groups for farming and hunting have “repeatedly spread falsehoods” about wolves in Switzerland, including by suggesting that the population is out of control, and a threat to people, tourism, and biodiversity.
Meanwhile, Switzerland’s largest party, the right wing Swiss People’s Party, has taken the popularisation of wolf persecution to a perverse level. It released an online video game for people to “stop the wolf!” by virtually slaughtering the predators to “protect children, farmers and livestock.”
The party paints a picture of the country’s mountain region being overrun with the predator. Like its video game, this characterisation is rather melodramatic. In 2023, monitoring of the Swiss wolf population detected just over 230 live individuals, in a country that is over 41,000 square kilometres in size.
Indeed, Wuethrich says the country could support many more wolf packs than it currently has. She also stresses that Switzerland serves as “a vital corridor for species dispersal and genetic exchange across the Alpine arc.” Considering this, the country’s persecution of wolves will be felt beyond its borders, as over 150 wildlife organisations highlighted in an open letter in 2023. They warned:
These radical, unilateral measures don’t just threaten Switzerland’s fragile wolf population, they negatively impact the entire Western-Central Alps wolf population.
Moreover, any suggestion that wolves are keen to attack children and other people is not grounded in fact. The EC analysis pointed out that wolves have not fatally wounded a person in Europe for at least 40 years. It said that compared to other large carnivores, “wolves are among the least dangerous species for their size and predatory potential.”
Meanwhile, a global report published in 2021 found that “the risks associated with a wolf attack are above zero, but far too low to calculate.”
Cows pose a considerably bigger threat to people in Europe than wolves. One study found them to be involved in over 200 human fatalities between 2000 and 2015, Rewilding Europe highlighted.
As Eurogroup for Animals’ Reineke Hameleers has put it:
The old tale of the bad wolf is exactly that: a tale. Wolves prefer predating wild ungulates over farm animals and, if unprovoked, are harmless towards humans.
Nonetheless, the notion of the big bad wolf attacking people has been brandished about in the debate. Indeed, EC president Von der Leyen has described the concentration of wolves in some European areas as a “real danger” for farmed animals “and potentially also humans.”
The Swiss authorities did not respond to a request for comment.
Huge public support for wolves
In Switzerland and elsewhere, the media has also been accused of playing a role in perpetuating fear and misinformation about the presence of wolves.
“Very little effort is made to even try to contextualise things“ in the media, says Wuethrich, because “sensationalism sells, scientific explanations don’t.”
However, despite efforts from politicians and interest groups to vilify the wolf, and the failure of the media to provide nuanced reporting, Wuethrich says polls consistently show that the Swiss public wants wildlife, including wolves, protected.
For instance, the public rejected a weakening of wolf protections in a 2020 referendum on the issue, albeit narrowly. Meanwhile, a YouGov poll in February measured support for the federal government’s preventative wolf killing policy. The poll found that people opposed to the policy outweighed those in support of it, with 46 percent against and a third in favour.
The Swiss are not alone. “Public support for strict protection of the wolf is incredibly high,” says Moroz. He points to a Europe-focused survey conducted in 2023 that found overwhelming support for the conservation and protection of large carnivores among respondents.
Interestingly, the survey targeted rural communities only, which are typically the stakeholders that media and political discourse suggests are most hostile to large carnivores.
In reality, the situation is more nuanced, with studies able to find mostly positive attitudes towards wolves even in locations where significant wolf-human conflict exists, such as central Portugal.
The Earth - and people - need wolves
There are several possible reasons why support for wolves endures. Their iconic status can be a tourism magnet in the places they inhabit, bringing both pleasure and income to the humans involved.
A recent US study highlighted the financial potential of wolf-driven tourism. It showed that the famed wolves of Yellowstone National Park bring in almost $83 million annually for the local economy there.
More broadly, the IUCN SSC Canid Specialist Group argued that human society is evolving. It said people are:
moving to a future where we embrace nature and cherish it as an important part of the solution to our global climate and biodiversity crisis, with added benefits to human wellbeing. Top predators such as wolves are an important part of that solution.
The experts highlighted that wolves play an invaluable role in ecosystems, including by reducing numbers of ungulates, such as deer and boars, and affecting their behaviour. This lowers the risk of overgrazing in ecosystems like forests, leaving them more resilient and healthy. In turn, this brings benefits such as enhanced carbon storage capacity and increased biodiversity in ecosystems. As wolves tend to prey on sick and infirm individuals, they can also reduce the risk of disease spread.
Moroz hopes that “common sense” and science-based decision-making prevails in the EU deliberations, which would enable wolves to continue fulfilling their important and iconic role in European landscapes.
This would clearly be in line with public opinion in Europe. It appears the vast majority of people reject the calls for repeating age-old patterns of persecution that have contributed to a planet in crisis.
Instead, they have their ears – and hearts – open to the call of the wild.
Excellent article. The knee-jerk reaction to managing wolf populations is just that and has nothing to do with reality and scientific data. As mentioned, apex predators are essential for a healthy and balanced ecosystem. Research in the US has shown that eradication efforts to control populations are unsuccessful because breeding females tend to have more pups to make up for the shortfall. If it wasn’t such a knee-jerk issue, the EU’s decision makers should look to the exhaustive research on the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone.
Perhaps weapon-carrying Homo sapiens sapiens should be downgraded to Appendix III, or better yet, not protected at all.