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The Independent
3 days ago
- Politics
- The Independent
How the far right is politicising the return of the wolf – and again threatening its presence in Europe
In Lower Saxony, in 2022, a wolf attacked and killed Dolly, Ursula von der Leyen's favourite pony. Strategically, this was a terribly poor move on the wolf's part. The president of the European Commission is a passionate equestrian. Citing 'numerous reports of wolf attacks on animals' and an unsubstantiated 'increased risk to local people', von der Leyen requested an in-depth analysis into the wolf's status in Europe. On the basis of that analysis, the European Commission voted last year to downgrade the wolf's level of protection, and on Monday that directive formally entered into force. With it began a whole new chapter in our relationship with the wolf. Wolves have been undergoing a remarkable resurgence. By the mid-20th century they had been pushed almost to extinction in Europe, but a combination of EU conservation measures and the abandonment of agricultural land means that today there are more than 23,000 across the continent, a species of least concern. In a biodiversity crisis, it is heartening to see nature's capacity to heal if we let it. For my book Lone Wolf I followed one of the pioneers. Slavc was a wolf born in the south of Slovenia in 2010, but at 18 months old he left his pack behind and set off on a 1,000-mile journey across the Alps. He crossed Slovenia and Austria, and four months later came to Italy, to the foothills north of Verona, where he bumped into a female wolf on a walkabout of her own. Astonishingly, perhaps the only two wild wolves for several thousand square miles had somehow found each other. When they bred, they became the first wolf pack back in these mountains for more than a century. Today, there are at least 17 packs in the region. Before setting out, Slavc had been fitted with a GPS collar. It gave researchers a unique chance to observe the path of a large carnivore through the heart of Europe; and it gave me an idea. More than a decade later I embarked, on foot, on the same path Slavc had travelled. I wanted to see how those living alongside the wolf once more were coping with its presence. I found shepherds and farmers working with dogs and electric fences, showing coexistence with carnivores is possible. But I also found that wherever the wolf has returned, the fear and hatred has come back, too. Alpine farmers live hard lives in hard places. Climate change; the rocketing costs of energy and feed; young people leaving for the cities: now they are being asked to tolerate the wolf. I could understand their anger. The wolf has become a convenient scapegoat for a range of complex problems, and one that can be addressed with a shotgun. Wolves kill at least 65,500 livestock annually in the EU (by comparison, dogs off the leash in the UK kill an estimated 15,000 sheep a year). Yet those herders taking measures to protect their flocks are often treated as traitors by their neighbours. Far-right, anti-EU parties, such as Austria's FPŐ, have been enflaming tensions in the countryside, refusing to countenance any solution except shooting them. The framing is that wolves are supported by an urban elite with no idea of how the land works. It has been a successful strategy. A 2022 German study found that wolf attacks led to far-right gains of between one and two percentage points in subsequent municipal elections. Only 2 per cent of European voters work in farming, but their voice is loud and they symbolise a much wider discontent about the green transition. It is a discontent the far-right are all too happy to encourage. Two years ago, when I walked Slavc's path, a change in law still seemed fanciful. That it has happened so quickly is indicative of how politics is shifting, and how politicised the wolf remains. Countries including Spain, Germany and France have already indicated or enacted changes in law, and other countries will follow suit. 'If we could count on logic and rationality and scientific rigour, this decision is not dangerous,' said Luigi Boitani, Italy's pre-eminent wolf expert. But as I saw in a long walk across Europe, that is rarely how we reason. Despite their numbers, wolves remain in 'unfavourable or inadequate conservation status' in all but one of Europe's biogeographical regions. A Swedish decision to reduce the country's wolf population from 300 to 170 risks pushing them into an 'extinction vortex'. A coalition of environmental groups are taking the European Commission to court over the decision, in a move backed by hundreds of conservationists. In the meantime, this summer is set to be the bloodiest for wolves for half a century. Whether it harms their numbers, and whether it assuages the anger in the countryside, remains to be seen.
Spectator
25-06-2025
- Spectator
The wolf as symbol of European anxieties
On 19 December 2011, at around 3.30 a.m., a young wolf in the mountains of southern Slovenia trots away from his pack and never looks back. For the next 90 days or so, Slavc (after Slavnik, the mountain of his home) lopes onwards, hardly stopping, fording fast rivers and traversing high passes, until at last, having cut a horseshoe loop through Austria, he crosses into Italy and stops in the picturesque Alpine plateau of Lessinia. More than a decade later, Adam Weymouth follows in the same wolf's padded footsteps. For Slavc, this is a journey into a landscape of confusing novelties, full of motorways and noise and anti-wolf country folk. Head down, a passing shadow in the night, he moves forwards, like 'a ship sailing off the world's edge'. What he finds across the horizon makes all his wandering worthwhile – a lone female from the Apennines, a nomad like him, with whom he quickly creates the region's first wolf pack for more than a century. For Weymouth, the journey – which he makes on foot, following coordinates generated by a GPS tracker attached to Slavc's neck – is also peppered with action and adventure. A hardy traveller (his previous book recounts a 2,000-mile canoe trip across Alaska), he thinks little of bunking down beside the trail or squatting in abandoned outhouses. While cautious about anthropomorphising his lupine guide ('I am not permitted to guess his thoughts'), his desire to 'feel animal' hovers close – as when he stands at the edge of a cliff over which Slavc had chased a horse to its death, or on the banks of a freezing river across which Slavc had swum. Yet the two are far from alike. Weymouth has a stove, and shop-bought food; Slavc has teeth. Weymouth wears warm clothes and waterproofs; Slavc makes do with fur. There is another big difference. While the wolf thinks only of the present, his pursuer is weighed down by questions, some indeterminable. What made Slavc leave? (Meat and mating, most probably.) Did he know where he was going? (Unlikely.) How many wolves now inhabit Europe? (An estimated 21,000-plus.) How many human fatalities have they caused? (Six in the past century, compared with 16 as a result of dog attacks in the UK in 2023 alone.) Other questions seek to separate fact from fiction. Do werewolves exist? (No; but people were still executed on the charge of being them as late as the 18th century.) Did a she-wolf really wean Romulus and Remus? (Again, no; although women once nurtured wolf cubs, according to Euripides.) Weymouth's main concern is with what Slavc's journey can teach us about modern Europe's 'faultlines'. The old ways are disappearing (farming, rural customs, the idea of nationhood), and the new is rushing in (migrants, climate catastrophe, community disintegration). What can the wolf reveal about these 'between times'? Weymouth puts the question to those who cross his path, from dairy farmers and shepherds to hunters and rewilders. The responses vary, but the underlying feeling is the same: fear. People are afraid – of the unknown, of the different, of the untamed. Here, the wolf is – and perhaps always has been – the perfect symbol. The thieving trickery of this 'amoral outcast' is seen as unbounded. Presented like that, parallels between the wolf and the economic migrant are all too clear (and perhaps convenient). Both arrive from the east; both 'slip across borders unnoticed'; both threaten the status quo. Is such a comparison fair or rational? No; but that won't alter how people feel. A self-confessed urban romantic, Weymouth wishes we could all just get along together – wolf, migrant and rustic local. Admirably, he doesn't try to disabuse his interlocutors of their fears. They are real. Loss of cultural diversity is, he notes, as serious as its biodiversity equivalent. Blaming wolves, whether real or imaginary, is misplaced. Yet, tackling root problems such as late-stage capitalism or the Common Agricultural Policy is far harder. As he wryly acknowledges: 'To shoot a wolf… gives at least the illusion of control.' The book is more fun than it sounds. Weymouth's polished prose captures both the joy and beauty of his peculiarly inspired trek. He can also be witty, as with his line about rows of snow cannons 'lined up in batteries, taking aim at climate change'. He never sees a wolf in the wild, but, camping out one night in Slovenia, a lynx passes close to his tent. In a flash, all his questions disappear. He merely sits there, acutely aware of his vulnerability, his earthy nature stirred, moved that human and predator should share the same space, 'both parts of a bigger whole'. If for that feeling alone, wolves deserve their place in our crowded modern world.
Yahoo
11-06-2025
- Yahoo
How One Animal Divided Europe
The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. In 2012, a young wolf named Slavc loped into the Lessini Mountains of Italy, completing a 1,200-mile route from Slovenia, where he was born. This was a dangerous place for a wolf to settle. The region had been proudly wolf free since about 1860; a stone commemorates the spot where the last one was killed. Slavc, who had been outfitted with a GPS collar by Slovenian biologists, soon encountered a female of his kind, a wanderer from the south. They became a pair—the first pack Lessinia had seen in more than a century—and the vanguard of a lupine renaissance. Within a decade, Italy would become home to 2,000 wolves in almost 20 packs. The resurgence of wolves is not strictly an Italian phenomenon. Whereas in the middle of the 20th century, wolves were nearly extinct in Europe, today, more than 20,000 roam the continent. Their howls are heard everywhere except in the countries they'd have to swim to: Malta, Cyprus, Iceland, Ireland, and the United Kingdom. 'Slavc's journey might have been extraordinary, but more astonishing still is how rapidly the wolf has repopulated these lands, as though it has never been away,' Adam Weymouth writes in his new book, Lone Wolf, which explores what a predator's return means to a people and a landscape that had forgotten it. Italy, Weymouth observes, 'was an empty stage waiting on its protagonist—hollows that could be dens, saplings that could be marking posts, deer that could be prey.' Weymouth is an uncommon brand of travel writer, weaving natural history with culture and politics. For his first book, Kings of the Yukon, he paddled 2,000 miles along the Yukon River in tandem with migrating king salmon, learning how this species, crucial for local livelihoods and prized commercially, shapes community identities in the Far North. In Lone Wolf, the author swaps runs of fish for a single predator. In 2022, Weymouth shouldered a rucksack to walk 1,000 miles along Slavc's GPS trail, following the hundreds of virtual breadcrumbs that marked the wolf's path from Slovenia to Italy. Weymouth slept in the same forests Slavc did, huffed across the same mountain passes, and traversed the same national borders. He spoke with Slovenian farmers, Austrian politicians, and Italian shepherds along the way to understand how the reemergence of wolves has troubled rural communities in the Southern Alps. [Read: The book that teaches us to live with our fears] But instead of showing how, as with salmon, a species can unite people, Weymouth's interactions document how one can divide them. Lone Wolf is much more than the story of Slavc: It is a vehicle for Weymouth to trace the fault lines splintering Europe and to examine how people respond when confronted by unwelcome change. Polarized politics, climate change, reduced demand for dairy products, and shifting demographics are affecting regions across Italy, especially rural ones. For the people of Lessinia, the return of the wolf seems to encompass multifarious anxieties, refracting, as Weymouth writes, 'the entirety of their frustration and their fear, like the sun through a magnifying glass.' From 2020 to 2021, wolves killed more than 400 farm animals. But carnivores are not the only disrupters in these areas. A drier climate means worsening conditions for grazing livestock; meanwhile, meager pay pushes younger generations down the slopes into cities such as Verona, waves of immigrants from places such as Bangladesh and North Africa are bringing new practices and norms to the countryside, and confusing European Union regulations are hobbling farmers throughout the continent. One rule, for instance, requires animals to be outdoors for at least half the year in order for a farm to qualify as organic and receive government subsidies. But if a wolf starts killing those animals, it's almost impossible to secure a permit to cull it. As Weymouth writes, in Austria, 'farmers are furious, villagers are terrified, and there is a general, all-pervasive sense throughout the country that all hell has broken loose.' The belief that government is an obstacle, not a solution, leads to hundreds of wolves being killed illegally each year, their carcasses displayed in public spaces beheaded, strung up, or skinned, as if in 'warning to other wolves or to those who support them.' Some populist politicians have promoted a narrative in which the hardworking farmer is a victim of out-of-touch urban elitists. Weymouth worries that this 'serves to dramatize the situation, creating further crises' for those whose livelihood depends on finding a way to coexist with the wolves. These predators once wreaked unequivocal havoc across Europe; from 1571 to 1920, they killed 5,400 people in France alone. Weymouth highlights specific wolves that perpetrated reigns of terror, such as the Beast of Gévaudan, an animal (or animals) that killed 113 people and wounded an additional 49 in southern France in the 1700s. Throughout the continent, farmers watched helplessly as wolves dwindled their flocks and sometimes even fed on their children. These types of stories breed an almost hereditary disdain: The wolf is, and can only ever be, an enemy. After hundreds of years of persistent persecution—one generation of farmers learning from the previous generation to poison, snare, and shoot wolves—the animals' near disappearance around the turn of the 20th century was celebrated throughout Europe as the end of a long, bloody, and hard-won war. Wolves did not simply stumble back into Europe in the 21st century. Their return was facilitated by the rise of environmentalism in the 1970s, and progressive laws aimed at restoring biodiversity. Improved habitat and reduced efforts to kill the animals allowed wolves to flourish. Biodiversity benefits humans as well: Extensive natural systems are more resilient to climate change, offer food security, and buffer us from the risk of zoonotic diseases such as coronaviruses. 'To have a good system you have to have every part of the system,' writes Weymouth, and this includes large carnivores. Although some might argue that the reemergence of wolves in Europe portends a return to the Bad Old Days, these creatures are also a sign that we are doing something right. [Read: The overlooked danger that's massacring wildlife] Does this drive toward biodiversity inevitably result in friction between predators and people? Well, yes, Dale Miquelle, a conservation biologist and an expert on carnivores of a different stripe (tigers), told me; the key is 'having effective conflict-mitigation systems in place to deal with human–large carnivore conflicts.' These might include honest communication between pro- and anti-predator groups, the investment of significant time and money to minimize clashes, and acknowledgment of the needs and concerns of everyone involved. Weymouth outlines multiple techniques to deter wolves from targeting livestock, including encouraging farmers to shepherd flocks as they graze, training dogs to wander pastures, and building fences to keep out wolves. Examples from places such as Kenya, Belize, and China demonstrate that these adaptations are highly effective at reducing carnivore attacks. However, as Weymouth reports, for many in the Lessinia mountains and similar farming regions, adopting such practices is seen as capitulation. Farmers who build fences might be viewed as traitors, siding with outsiders who have no understanding of country ways. But the wolf's return to Europe can be sustainable only if farmers and other inhabitants buy into the process. For that to happen, their voices need to be truly heard by politicians and conservationists. When a wolf attacked a child in Rome last year and was relocated instead of euthanized, some Italians saw this as proof that the government was prioritizing wolf lives over human ones. Conservation advocates will have to make concessions to build trust, and some wolves will have to be removed from the wild. Finally, as Weymouth notes, the cause of conservation is hurt when advocates paint an unrealistic picture of the wolf. 'Part of its rebrand in recent years has been the widely put-about assertion that a wolf, or a healthy wolf at least, would never kill a human,' he writes. Wolves are, in fact, opportunistic predators, and should never be considered harmless. Wolves do kill people, albeit rarely; in North America, they did so as recently as 2010, when a teacher was killed in southwestern Alaska. Understanding these animals requires getting to know them, perhaps by literally following in their tracks. With so much modern wildlife science done remotely via GPS collars and satellite imagery, it's refreshing to simply take in the landscapes and cultures of Southern Europe with Weymouth as our guide. He carefully picks at the Gordian knot linking wolves and rural communities, teases out nuances, and tells a complex story of a world in transition. 'There are dramatic changes happening all across the Alps. Migration, depopulation, melting glaciers, dying forests. I have seen how people are scared of their lives changing, how they want it all to stop, and how politicians of a certain stripe continue to stoke those fears while promising that everything can stay the same,' he writes. 'We are all plunging forward into an uncharted world, and the only fantasy is that we can stop it.' To observe and absorb the natural-human interface, as Weymouth does, is an art, one that would benefit those on both sides of the wolf divide. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
11-06-2025
- Atlantic
How One Animal Divided Europe
In 2012, a young wolf named Slavc loped into the Lessini Mountains of Italy, completing a 1,200-mile route from Slovenia, where he was born. This was a dangerous place for a wolf to settle. The region had been proudly wolf free since about 1860; a stone commemorates the spot where the last one was killed. Slavc, who had been outfitted with a GPS collar by Slovenian biologists, soon encountered a female of his kind, a wanderer from the south. They became a pair—the first pack Lessinia had seen in more than a century—and the vanguard of a lupine renaissance. Within a decade, Italy would become home to 2,000 wolves in almost 20 packs. The resurgence of wolves is not strictly an Italian phenomenon. Whereas in the middle of the 20th century, wolves were nearly extinct in Europe, today, more than 20,000 roam the continent. Their howls are heard everywhere except in the countries they'd have to swim to: Malta, Cyprus, Iceland, Ireland, and the United Kingdom. 'Slavc's journey might have been extraordinary, but more astonishing still is how rapidly the wolf has repopulated these lands, as though it has never been away,' Adam Weymouth writes in his new book, Lone Wolf, which explores what a predator's return means to a people and a landscape that had forgotten it. Italy, Weymouth observes, 'was an empty stage waiting on its protagonist—hollows that could be dens, saplings that could be marking posts, deer that could be prey.' Weymouth is an uncommon brand of travel writer, weaving natural history with culture and politics. For his first book, Kings of the Yukon, he paddled 2,000 miles along the Yukon River in tandem with migrating king salmon, learning how this species, crucial for local livelihoods and prized commercially, shapes community identities in the Far North. In Lone Wolf, the author swaps runs of fish for a single predator. In 2022, Weymouth shouldered a rucksack to walk 1,000 miles along Slavc's GPS trail, following the hundreds of virtual breadcrumbs that marked the wolf's path from Slovenia to Italy. Weymouth slept in the same forests Slavc did, huffed across the same mountain passes, and traversed the same national borders. He spoke with Slovenian farmers, Austrian politicians, and Italian shepherds along the way to understand how the reemergence of wolves has troubled rural communities in the Southern Alps. But instead of showing how, as with salmon, a species can unite people, Weymouth's interactions document how one can divide them. Lone Wolf is much more than the story of Slavc: It is a vehicle for Weymouth to trace the fault lines splintering Europe and to examine how people respond when confronted by unwelcome change. Polarized politics, climate change, reduced demand for dairy products, and shifting demographics are affecting regions across Italy, especially rural ones. For the people of Lessinia, the return of the wolf seems to encompass multifarious anxieties, refracting, as Weymouth writes, 'the entirety of their frustration and their fear, like the sun through a magnifying glass.' From 2020 to 2021, wolves killed more than 400 farm animals. But carnivores are not the only disrupters in these areas. A drier climate means worsening conditions for grazing livestock; meanwhile, meager pay pushes younger generations down the slopes into cities such as Verona, waves of immigrants from places such as Bangladesh and North Africa are bringing new practices and norms to the countryside, and confusing European Union regulations are hobbling farmers throughout the continent. One rule, for instance, requires animals to be outdoors for at least half the year in order for a farm to qualify as organic and receive government subsidies. But if a wolf starts killing those animals, it's almost impossible to secure a permit to cull it. As Weymouth writes, in Austria, 'farmers are furious, villagers are terrified, and there is a general, all-pervasive sense throughout the country that all hell has broken loose.' The belief that government is an obstacle, not a solution, leads to hundreds of wolves being killed illegally each year, their carcasses displayed in public spaces beheaded, strung up, or skinned, as if in 'warning to other wolves or to those who support them.' Some populist politicians have promoted a narrative in which the hardworking farmer is a victim of out-of-touch urban elitists. Weymouth worries that this 'serves to dramatize the situation, creating further crises' for those whose livelihood depends on finding a way to coexist with the wolves. These predators once wreaked unequivocal havoc across Europe; from 1571 to 1920, they killed 5,400 people in France alone. Weymouth highlights specific wolves that perpetrated reigns of terror, such as the Beast of Gévaudan, an animal (or animals) that killed 113 people and wounded an additional 49 in southern France in the 1700s. Throughout the continent, farmers watched helplessly as wolves dwindled their flocks and sometimes even fed on their children. These types of stories breed an almost hereditary disdain: The wolf is, and can only ever be, an enemy. After hundreds of years of persistent persecution—one generation of farmers learning from the previous generation to poison, snare, and shoot wolves—the animals' near disappearance around the turn of the 20th century was celebrated throughout Europe as the end of a long, bloody, and hard-won war. Wolves did not simply stumble back into Europe in the 21st century. Their return was facilitated by the rise of environmentalism in the 1970s, and progressive laws aimed at restoring biodiversity. Improved habitat and reduced efforts to kill the animals allowed wolves to flourish. Biodiversity benefits humans as well: Extensive natural systems are more resilient to climate change, offer food security, and buffer us from the risk of zoonotic diseases such as coronaviruses. 'To have a good system you have to have every part of the system,' writes Weymouth, and this includes large carnivores. Although some might argue that the reemergence of wolves in Europe portends a return to the Bad Old Days, these creatures are also a sign that we are doing something right. Does this drive toward biodiversity inevitably result in friction between predators and people? Well, yes, Dale Miquelle, a conservation biologist and an expert on carnivores of a different stripe (tigers), told me; the key is 'having effective conflict-mitigation systems in place to deal with human–large carnivore conflicts.' These might include honest communication between pro- and anti-predator groups, the investment of significant time and money to minimize clashes, and acknowledgment of the needs and concerns of everyone involved. Weymouth outlines multiple techniques to deter wolves from targeting livestock, including encouraging farmers to shepherd flocks as they graze, training dogs to wander pastures, and building fences to keep out wolves. Examples from places such as Kenya, Belize, and China demonstrate that these adaptations are highly effective at reducing carnivore attacks. However, as Weymouth reports, for many in the Lessinia mountains and similar farming regions, adopting such practices is seen as capitulation. Farmers who build fences might be viewed as traitors, siding with outsiders who have no understanding of country ways. But the wolf's return to Europe can be sustainable only if farmers and other inhabitants buy into the process. For that to happen, their voices need to be truly heard by politicians and conservationists. When a wolf attacked a child in Rome last year and was relocated instead of euthanized, some Italians saw this as proof that the government was prioritizing wolf lives over human ones. Conservation advocates will have to make concessions to build trust, and some wolves will have to be removed from the wild. Finally, as Weymouth notes, the cause of conservation is hurt when advocates paint an unrealistic picture of the wolf. 'Part of its rebrand in recent years has been the widely put-about assertion that a wolf, or a healthy wolf at least, would never kill a human,' he writes. Wolves are, in fact, opportunistic predators, and should never be considered harmless. Wolves do kill people, albeit rarely; in North America, they did so as recently as 2010, when a teacher was killed in southwestern Alaska. Understanding these animals requires getting to know them, perhaps by literally following in their tracks. With so much modern wildlife science done remotely via GPS collars and satellite imagery, it's refreshing to simply take in the landscapes and cultures of Southern Europe with Weymouth as our guide. He carefully picks at the Gordian knot linking wolves and rural communities, teases out nuances, and tells a complex story of a world in transition. 'There are dramatic changes happening all across the Alps. Migration, depopulation, melting glaciers, dying forests. I have seen how people are scared of their lives changing, how they want it all to stop, and how politicians of a certain stripe continue to stoke those fears while promising that everything can stay the same,' he writes. 'We are all plunging forward into an uncharted world, and the only fantasy is that we can stop it.' To observe and absorb the natural-human interface, as Weymouth does, is an art, one that would benefit those on both sides of the wolf divide.
