Amendment – If in Doubt, Shoot the Wolf

The Federal Ministry of the Environment decides on simplified shooting of wolves. Every time a sheep is killed, the hunt for wolves is open for 21 days. Is hunting wolves more important than protecting the forests? 

Wolves are back in Germany. That’s good news. Unfortunately, the Federal Ministry for the Environment has decided to make it easier to shoot them. “The return of wolves to Germany has been leading to conflict and challenges,” says Steffi Lemke, Federal Minister for the Environment and member of the Green Party. In December, the conference of the State Ministers of the Environment decided that whenever livestock is killed, wolves may be shot for 21 days in a surrounding area of 1 kilometer from the site. 

But what exactly counts as an “area of increased numbers of sheep killed” is determined by the federal states. Also, it is no longer necessary to give DNA evidence for wolf bites, which means that wolves may be shot without further ado. The local authorities then have to find out afterward – through clues and expert knowledge – if the reason for a sheep’s death may have been a wolf. 

Lemke says that the time to obtain a shooting permission took too long in the past. After all, as wolf populations grow, the number of killings increase. 

This, however, is highly speculative: Just because there are more wolves does not mean that they attack livestock immediately. This is too simple an assessment of the situation, as Lemke fails to take forests as factor into consideration: If there were sufficient woodland areas for the wolves to roam their territory, humans and their livestock would never catch sight of a wolf. But humans are diminishing the wolves’ territories considerably. 

Certainly, it should be the responsibility of farmers and livestock owners to protect their property by putting up fences and checking them routinely. 

As the amendment is passed, it is now legal to kill all wolves surrounding a dead sheep for a period of three weeks – including whole packs of wolves, cubs and adult animals passing by at random. And what happens if the wrong wolf is shot?

Klaus Hackländer, head of the Institute for Wildlife Biology and Hunting at the BOKU University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences in Vienna and president of the Deutsche Wildtier Stiftung (English: German Wildlife Foundation), says in an interview for GEO magazine that the number of single wolf shootings in Germany per year must be regulated by the government. This number should be calculated by two factors: the state of preservation should not deteriorate, and its achievement should not be at risk.

Lemke claims that wolves were part of “our landscape” – but there is one significant flaw: The place for wolves is the forest, their natural habitat. With forest areas shrinking, wolves become increasingly dangerous to humans and sheep. The Federal Ministry for the Environment, however, prefers hunting wolves over protecting the forests.

There are currently 184 packs of wolves in Germany – more than at the previous census. According to the Federal Agency for Nature Conservation (BfN), 47 wolf couples and 22 sedentary individual wolves were confirmed for 2022/2023. 

In some cases, wolves may even protect sheep and shepherds. In 2019, I wrote a report on Frank Neumann, a shepherd from the Lusatia area in eastern Germany, and his flock of 1000 sheep. His herd lived in a wolf territory and were protected by electric fences. The adult wolves had to learn to keep clear of the sheep the hard way – and passed their knowledge on to their cubs who refused to go anywhere near the flock. Neumann says the cubs learned from their parents that “sheep hurt”. In consequence, the younger wolves are no longer interested in any sheep, whether they are fenced in or not. 

“The only potentially dangerous situation for sheep and livestock on the farm,” said Neumann, “are young individuals who have left the pack recently, roaming the area unaware of the electric fence.” This is why Neumann took many years to establish a system – with the help of a family of wolves. Roaming individuals recognize the territory of a functional family by scratch and urine markings and howling. Then they do not settle down, but they leave the area quickly – or do not enter in the first place. This system only works if there is enough forest area available for wolves to establish different territories. 

The newly passed shooting amendment could also backfire drastically and destroy the natural balance. If a wolf is shot from a family, in the worst case the alpha male, the entire family breaks up. If a mother wolf is killed, the cubs can no longer be nourished – meaning they either starve or desperately search for the next prey to kill. 

And if a family of wolves breaks up, roaming wolves may enter the territory established by the family and mate with females and offspring. “This disrupts the balance of the whole territory,” says Neumann. “The wolves monitor themselves. They don’t need humans to do it.” Meanwhile, Neumann does not have any sheep anymore – an open-cast lignite mine has been built on his former 2500 hectares in Lusatia. He was compensated, the sheep were slaughtered, and the wolves were driven away. This, as a matter of fact, was not regulated by nature – but by humans.