Nzatu Food Group

The death knell sounds for European wolves as a majority of countries back the proposal to lower their protection EU ambassadors voted today in favour of the Commission’s proposal to downgrade the wolf’s status from “strictly protected” to “protected” under the Bern Convention. Only Spain and Ireland voted against. A final vote will take place tomorrow after which the Bern Convention must be notified. This decision sounds a clarion call for the mass culling of wolves across Europe, with countries free to decide quotas, methods and timeframes, provided the wolf’s “favourable” conservation status is maintained. The wolf’s conservation status is deemed unfavourable in 6 of Europe’s 9 biogeographical regions. It is only favourable in the Alpine region, but here too wolves are not out of the woods and the culling of local populations to below the minimum viable population, as Switzerland is currently doing, risks the loss of genetic diversity and gene flow. To which must be added the threat of habitat fragmentation. And illegal killing, which culling has shown to worsen. Culling can also worsen the very livestock predation which wolves are increasingly being blamed for by disrupting wolf societies and increasing their reproductive rates, which in turn result in more inexperienced young wolves. Yet wolves prefer to feed on wild prey and the number of sheep they do kill annually represents just 0.065% of the total size of Europe’s flocks. But there is nothing scientific, fair or indeed democratic about this decision. Four decades of conservation success will be undone at the stroke of a pen at the behest of a small vocal minority spearheaded by farming and hunting lobbies. The wolf is the obvious scapegoat, warped by human mythology, exaggeration and fairy tales into a cruel, deceitful super-predator with an eclectic taste for old grandmothers and little pigs by the trio. How can we shake free of the fear of the wolf as the Devil's familiar instilled in us by the Catholic Church in the late, dark Middle Ages or Matthew 7:15's warning to: “Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves.” How can our wolves ever shake free from the hirsute and horrible image of the lunatic, bloodthirsty werewolf we have tarred them with? It wasn’t always so. Go back some 20,000 years and early humans and wolves hunted the same prey using force of numbers to bring them down. We fed at each others kills and antagonism gradually gave way to cooperation. Wolves crept out of the darkness and morphed into Canis lupus familiaris long before sheep, cows or horses were domesticated. But when humans began keeping livestock around 8,000 BC, persecution of the wolf began in earnest... until reason, public opinion and legislation forced a change. Now we are resurrecting old myths and prejudices and killing wolves again. At the eleventh hour we are turning back the clock. And turning our backs on wolves.

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Swiss wolf cull - the Grisons to start shooting cubs The canton of Grisons has announced it will begin killing wolf cubs next month. And only once these young animals despatched, will the guns be turned on the adults. Helpless cubs can't be left to starve to death in the absence of their parents. It behoves a civilised state to uphold animal welfare standards, after all. Whole packs will thus be clinically extirpated though the canton won’t say which packs it plans to target, presumably so as to hinder any last ditch legal pushback attempts. Switzerland’s second wolf cull comes on the heels of last winter’s killing fest which saw 45 of the country’s “protected” wolves legally shot in two months, sometimes using hunting devices and methods proscribed by cantonal laws. This time the condoned slaughter will last five months, with the two most rabidly anti-wolf cantons, the Valais and Grisons, battling it out for lupine loss supremacy. It promises to be a wildlife killing contest of Far West proportions. To level the playing field, the Grisons is now also inviting its hunters (some 435 permits issued) to join the canton’s game warden in despatching these pesky predators which it claims are multiplying like proverbial rabbits and terrorising all in their wake. Aspiring Grisonian wolf slayers will be given two hours to learn the skills required to track down and shoot their prey. 115 wolves are estimated to currently haunt the canton. But not for much longer (cue Sergei Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf). One savvy pack however has decamped to Switzerland’s sole National Park located, as luck would have it, in the Grisons, where it has tentatively been welcomed for its biodiversity boosting and red deer controlling abilities. These qualities could be put to good use throughout Switzerland where the loss of biodiversity has been described as “alarming” and where surging ungulate and wild boar populations are causing equally alarming damage to both forests and agriculture. But they will be squandered instead, along with Switzerland's wolves. And the Grisons of Davos and St Moritz fame along with the Valais of Zermatt renown will go on portraying themselves as bastions of nature and natural beauty while behind the scenes and under the cover of darkness, their wolves, those true icons of untrammelled wilderness, will be gradually but inexorably whittled away. Image source: Peter Dettling - https://lnkd.in/eyrwXnND His latest book is also available here: https://www.lufs.ch/ References: https://lnkd.in/e4ZiSmKB and https://lnkd.in/eqeR-sev (my thanks to Barbara Oswald for drawing attention to this)