Livestock keepers are seeing increasing losses from wolves, especially among sheep. While some call for better protection for grazing animals, others call for the predator to be hunted.
Federal Minister of Agriculture Julia Klöckner (CDU) has spoken out in favor of hunting animals in certain regions in view of the increasing damage caused by wolf cracks.
The minister told the Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung (Saturday) that it was not about exterminating the wolf. “But if we don’t want to give up grazing animals in some regions, we have to act.”
The German Farmers’ Association had previously warned that the latest statistics presented by the Federal Documentation and Advice Center on Wolf (DBBW) mark the end of grazing. The wolf population must finally be regulated, it said in a message on Friday. “Otherwise the keeping of sheep, goats, horses and cattle in the pasture will become obsolete,” said the president of the farmers and winegrowers ‘association of Rhineland-Palatinate South and environmental officer of the German farmers’ association, Eberhard Hartelt.
According to the latest statistics from the DBBW on damage caused by wolves, 3959 grazing animals were killed by wolves in Germany in 2020, including 3444 sheep. The number of livestock killed, injured or missing as a result of a wolf attack increased by 37 percent compared to the previous year.
According to the DBBW figures, Lower Saxony recorded the most wolf victims with 1,477 farm animals being killed, followed by Brandenburg (864) and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania (452).
Klöckner referred to the high ascent and asked: “Where does this end if we don’t intervene now?” Where there are many wolves and the population is not endangered, a regional population management is urgently needed, demanded the Agriculture Minister. So far only wolves may be shot that have been proven to have overcome protective measures and, for example, killed sheep.
However, the DBBW experts also point out that wolf cracks mainly occur where sheep and goat farmers have not yet adjusted to the presence of wolves. In some federal states such as Lower Saxony or Schleswig-Holstein there was no or only limited herd protection in over 80 percent of the attacks.
The Greens parliamentary group in the Bundestag accused Klöckner of a populist policy at the expense of nature conservation. “In order to minimize conflicts, we rely on good and preventive herd protection measures and a grazing animal bonus,” said the spokeswoman for animal welfare Renate Künast on Saturday.
With the advancing re-spread of the wolf in Germany, there have recently been increasing demands from associations and politicians for a regulation of the wolf population. In return, animal and environmental protectionists pointed out that even if wolves were shot down, wolf rifts would still occur and only better pasture protection measures could help.
The wolf is protected under EU and federal law and may not be hunted. According to statistics, 128 wolf families, 39 wolf pairs and 9 individual territorial animals were detected in Germany in the monitoring year 2019/20.
Jane Stock is a technology author, who has written for 24 Hours World. She writes about the latest in technology news and trends, and is always on the lookout for new and innovative ways to improve his audience’s experience.
