The fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989 brought many changes to Europe. One of the more unexpected was that it allowed the big carnivores of Eastern Europe to begin expanding their range westward, where for centuries they had been practically unknown.
Few large mammals, people included, had been permitted to cross from east to west before the borders reopened. From the guard towers, they shot the bears for fun. Today, the European wolf is undergoing a remarkable resurgence. Once the most widely spread terrestrial mammal on the planet, by the end of the Second World War they had been pushed almost to extinction. They were entirely gone from Central Europe and Scandinavia. But for two small groups in the Apennines, a few in Iberia and some larger pockets in Eastern Europe, you would have struggled to find any at all.
Yet this was not to be the wolf’s final act. As the European bloc expanded with the end of the Cold War, it continued to favour the lives of grey wolves. Not only could the carnivores push west, but scientists could share knowledge freely across the continent.
Environmental legislation – first the Bern Convention in 1979, then the Habitats Directive of 1992 – listed large carnivores such as wolves, bears and lynx as species requiring special protection. The abandonment of rural land – one assessment estimates that an area of farmland the size of Italy will have been abandoned in the three decades to 2030 – has further aided wolf recolonization. Since the 1960s, numbers have increased by 1,800 per cent. There are now as many as 21,500 roaming the continent, putting them as a species of ‘Least Concern’.
Return to Europe
Their return is also due to their remarkable ability to cover vast distances in search of new territories. For my book, Lone Wolf, I retraced on foot the journey of one GPS‑tracked wolf who had walked more than a thousand miles across the Alps, from Slovenia through Austria, going on to form the first pack in the north‑eastern Italian Alps for more than a century.
By walking in his footsteps, a decade after his own journey in the winter of 2011, I hoped to see how those living alongside the wolf once again were coping with its presence. What I found was a highly politicized animal, and that everywhere the wolf has returned, so have the fear and hatred.
Alpine farmers live hard lives in hard places. The effects of climate change, inflation, migration and rural depopulation have taken their toll. Now they are being told, by city dwellers, that it is a good idea to welcome back the wolf to restore a broken ecosystem. Their anger was easy to comprehend. Wolves kill only 0.07 per cent of European sheep and goat populations – far less than those lost to natural causes – but an attack on livestock is highly emotional for their owners and the violent manner of death can be shocking.
A 10-year-old male wolf at the Wolf Science Center, Austria. Photo: Adam Weymouth.
And some farmers are disproportionately affected. I met one in Slovenia who had lost 120 sheep in the first year that wolves came back to his village. Compensation is available, but the bureaucracy can be slow and money cannot make up for the psychological impact. Unlike more abstract issues such as the Common Agricultural Policy, a wolf is a problem farmers can do something about with a shotgun, albeit risking a lengthy prison sentence and fines of tens of thousands of euros.
Political pressure
Frequently, I found wolves being made a scapegoat for more complicated problems. Coexistence is certainly possible, and I met those who had employed electric fences and guard dogs and never lost a sheep. Undoubtedly, wolves mean more work for farmers, but from Italy to Spain shepherding schools are proliferating, reviving traditional ways to live alongside returning wolf populations through herd management and protective measures.
Politics further complicates the story. Frequently I found that those protecting their flocks were treated as traitors by their neighbours, the measures they were taking seen as tantamount to acceptance of the wolf’s return. Instead, encouraged by local politicians keen to enflame tensions, farmers told me they were continuing to send their livestock up to the mountains without protection, into what one NGO described as ‘a state‑sanctioned slaughterhouse’.
To embrace the role of underdog at the mercy of an elite is a populist tactic. It serves to dramatize a political dynamic, but does little for the farmers most in need of a solution. I found politicians on the populist right and far‑right leaning into this position. A 2022 German study found that wolf attacks correlated to far‑right gains of between one and two percentage points in subsequent municipal elections.
Pressure has also come from the highest echelons of the European Union. When I followed my wolf’s trail across Europe a change in the law seemed fanciful. Then, in 2022, a wolf made the strategically unwise move of eating Dolly, a 30‑year‑old pony belonging to Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission. (Dolly had no electric fence to protect her.)
‘The whole family is horribly distressed,’ Von der Leyen told the press. Citing ‘numerous reports of wolf attacks on animals’ and an unsubstantiated ‘increased risk to local people’, she requested an in‑depth analysis into the wolf’s status in Europe. On the basis of that analysis, the European Commission downgraded the wolf’s level of protection.
Downgrading wolf protections
The redesignation is far from a free‑for‑all. The wolf’s new status is equivalent to that of a chamois, say, or a golden jackal, ‘protected’ rather than ‘strictly protected’. Plenty of people, wolf biologists included, have said that making it easier to manage populations is not necessarily a bad thing.