Why is Europe worried about wolves?
15:31 Share

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK.

Available now on The Documentary from the BBC World Service, Stephen Coates takes you to the Morse Code World Championships. In an internet-connected world, Morse Code, the alphabet of dots and dashes, might now feel from a different era. I'm meeting some of the people who are keeping the code alive. Morse Code, ready to transmit. Listen now by searching The Documentary, wherever you get your BBC podcasts.

The most wonderful time of the year. Although, let's be honest, around the holidays, things really add up. But here's the good news. Only at Verizon, you can get a single line for $50 per month when you switch and bring your phone. So while ice skating for two is definitely costing more, here at Verizon, you can save. Gifts for your third cousins? Steep. A single line with Verizon? Not so steep. A real tree? Pricey. A single line with Verizon? Less pricey.

Flights to see Meemaw and Pops? Those are up. A $50 per month single line? That's down. Even a trip to the San Jose Holiday Market will cost you more. But with Verizon, you can switch and bring your phone for just $50 per month for a single line on Unlimited Welcome with auto pay plus taxes and fees. All this to say, during the holiday season, when everything is costing more, you can get more for less right now at a local Verizon store. $15 monthly promo credit supplied over 36 months with a new line on Unlimited Welcome.

In times of congestion, unlimited 5G/4G LTE may be temporarily slower than other traffic. Domestic data roaming at 2G speeds. Additional terms apply. In Europe, the wolf population is on the rise. After years of being hunted to near extinction, wolves were given strictly protected status, and they're thriving. They've been attacking livestock and even wandering into towns and cities.

Now, those wolves are going to lose some of that protection. So people in the EU will be allowed to kill a certain number each year. And this has been met with mixed feelings from farmers and conservationists because they can help the environment too. So in this episode, you're going to hear what's been going on with the wolves. And we're going to give you some fun facts about them too. I'm Hannah Gelbart, and this is What in the World from the BBC World Service.

To talk us through this is Amelia Jansson, a BBC reporter from Finland. Hello. Hello. So Finland is one of these places where the wolf population has been growing. Have you ever seen one yourself? No, I haven't. But my town is a very good case study for this because when I was growing up there 10 years ago, we didn't have any wolves in my town. That was unthinkable.

And now, 10 years later, there are lots of wolf sightings pretty much every day. In fact, the police issued a statement earlier this autumn saying that they had never had so many reports of wolves from my town. And my mum's seen the wolf when she's been driving to work. The Facebook groups are going wild because people are posting pictures of the wolf near them when they're going out for walks with their dog. And there's one specific wolf sighting

which has made people very frustrated because it's been coming so close to people. It's been walking around the train station in my town and it hasn't seemed scared of human beings. Sounds like it's trying to catch a ride. How many wolves are there in Finland now? So in Finland, there's about 300 wolves in total. There's been a 10% increase every year since 2017.

It doesn't seem like a big number in comparison to some other European countries. But I think the reason why it's become such a huge issue in Finland is because the wolves have spread from the eastern border, where not that many people live, to the southwest, where lots of people live. And so they've kind of gone from the rural areas to moving into the urban areas.

What are the main risks of having an increasing number of wolves roaming around, especially urbanised areas? The main risk is the issue with livestock. So farmers are very angry because sheep keep getting killed. I went to Finland and did some reporting on this and I spoke to a lady who has a stable with over 50 horses and the wolves are there basically every day and one of their ponies was sadly killed. It was three in the morning.

And I looked at the fields, everything was okay. In the morning when my husband came here, about six o'clock, three hours later, he called me and said that there was a wolf. Ten minutes later he called me and said that they had took our pony. We were all very sad because it was like a family member first. We have been throwing these wolves with buckets and everything. And they run away like ten meters and then they stand and look at us. What are you doing?

So the livestock issue is probably the biggest one, but there's also the ingrained fear. So lots of people that I spoke to in Finland were saying that wolves are quite scary as an animal. And suddenly people who have lived in the Southwest for decades are

are faced with wolves roaming around their backyards in the forests. And for Finnish people who are used to being outside in the forest a lot, you know, we go mushroom picking, we go blueberry picking. This is part of our culture. So to suddenly be afraid of going out into the forest is quite a new feeling. And so it's been a huge change in people's behaviour. And where else? What other parts of Europe have growing wolf populations?

So lots of countries have wolves nowadays, everywhere from Spain to Central Europe, Romania have lots. It's said that Italy has the most wolves in Europe. There's currently around 3,300. They're mainly around the Alps. The Netherlands didn't have wolves for 160 years, but in 2019, they had their first wolf, which came back to the country. And since then, they've got an established wolf pack now in the Netherlands as well. We've talked about some of the dangers and the fear that people associate with wolves, but...

What are the positives of having a thriving wolf population?

Wolves are really good for our ecosystem. They regulate the deer population and that's partly why in Finland the wolves have spread to the southwest because there's so many deer there so they've gone hunting. So wolves are a natural part of our ecosystem and also there's the question about can human beings force wolves out of their natural land. Wolves live in very diverse landscapes and so they thrive all over Europe and

And it was humans that hunted and killed the wolves. So now they've made a comeback. So is it then the human being's role to decide that actually they're not allowed to make this their home, even though it originally was? MUSIC

In Europe, as we've been hearing, the wolf population has been allowed to grow naturally. Another approach is called rewilding. So animals are purposefully reintroduced to an environment. That has happened in Yellowstone Park in the US. And in Scotland, there are discussions to introduce wolves as a way to manage the number of deer eating young trees.

But aside from population control of other species, why could wolves be a good thing? Here is a voice note that we were sent. My name is Antti Haatea. I am an author and a photographer from Finland. And I do specialize in apex predators and other large mammals in Nordic countries, as well as the climate change and biodiversity crisis.

Now the problem is that the positive effects of wolves are harder to quantify and present to people than the negative effects. It's easy to calculate how many sheep did a wolf kill, but at the same time it's harder to show that wolves increase, for example, the carbon intake of forest. Because of wolves the carbon sinks in Finnish forests are larger.

And this has a very large positive effect on the nation's ability and the world's ability to adapt to climate change because carbon sinks naturally, scatters carbon from the air and reduces the negative effects of climate change.

Let's hear more about how wolves live in the wild. There are several different species of wolves, including the grey wolf, which is the most common one. Abby Keller works at the International Wolf Centre in Minnesota in the US, and she has all the best wolf facts for you. Wolves are found in pretty much everywhere across the northern hemisphere of the globe. A lot of people think that they are nocturnal, but they're actually what we would call crepuscular. So they're most active at dawn and dusk. So

Generally, people have this idea of wolves as being a carnivore, which they are. That means that they eat meat. Now, in the wild, they typically will rely on large kind of hoofed animals, what we call ungulates. So anything that's really deer-like. But they also will rely on smaller items as well during some of the leaner times of year where the deer are maybe a little bit trickier to catch.

They're also a very social carnivore, so they actually exist in pack units of around six to eight wolves per pack. It can vary depending on what region you're in, but there used to be this idea that the kind of leader of the pack was called the alpha, and that that alpha got their place by being the biggest, the strongest, the most aggressive in the pack.

And they kind of fought their way to the top. But back in around the 1970s, we learned that that's not really the case. Really, it's more of a family unit. So we see the dominant male and the dominant female are really just the parents. And then the rest of the pack are the offspring. So they're kids, basically.

Once those kids get around one to three years of age, they become sexually mature and they will disperse or leave their pack and go find another dispersing individual and establish their own territory and make their own pack. And what about their communication? Abby says they are social animals and their howls might not be as scary as you think.

A lot of times we think about communication as just being vocalizations, which wolves do rely on quite a bit. They like to howl and growl and snarl and snap and whine and make all of these different noises, but a lot of their communication is more based off of body language. Their tail positions, their ear positions, their facial expressions, all of that can really tell you how a wolf is feeling in a given situation. They are

very reliant on what we call ritualized dominance. So it's this kind of very loud, boisterous way of kind of correcting more subordinate members to make sure that everyone's kind of keeping calm. And overall, these little moments of conflict and resolution, although they may be very noisy at times, they don't really result in any injury, and they're going to make a more cohesive pack overall.

So a lot of times people get this perception that because they're so loud and because they use their teeth to kind of communicate, they see that and they think, oh, this wolf is aggressive or, oh, this wolf is angry. But really, they're just telling another wolf to, hey, quit what you're doing or, hey, back off. I think a lot of cultures have this kind of

history of fearing wolves. There's a lot of folklore and a lot of tales that depict the wolf as, you know, the big bad wolf or this big scary creature that represents the wild and the unknown. But the more we learn about wolves, the more we see that they're just really social animals. And we learn that they're not really all that, you know, aggressive towards people. In fact, they're a lot more afraid of us than we are of them.

As they kind of start coming near people, they may get a little bit more habituated. But as long as we kind of keep up that natural kind of healthy fear of staying away from people, then they don't really want to approach us very much. So just how dangerous are wolves? I'm going to take you through some numbers. A 2023 report on EU countries found that there had been no fatal wolf attacks on people in 40 years. So that does sound pretty promising. Absolutely.

However, if you look outside the EU, there's a study from 2002 to 2020, and it says that there have been at least 26 fatal attacks by wolves, with the most, 12, in Turkey. Others have happened in Iran, India, Canada, the United States, Tajikistan and Kazakhstan.

So the numbers are still pretty low for fatal attacks, but lots of countries don't record this data, so it doesn't give us a full picture of wolf attacks around the world. As Amelia said, wolves do target livestock, and that same EU report found that around 50,000 of the EU's 68 million sheep and goats are killed by wolves each year. But to put that in perspective, that is just 0.065% of the total number of the animals.

Let's hear more now about that change in wolf protection status in the EU. Amelia, for 45 years, grey wolves had the second highest level of protection in European Union laws. What did that actually mean? So under the Berne Convention, which is this international treaty on nature conservation, wolves had the strictly protected status, which is the highest level.

status you can have. And that meant that there were very, very strict laws on hunting and killing wolves. And you had to apply for permits and it was very rare to get one of them. And you were only allowed to do that if the wolves were posing a serious threat to livestock or to health and safety. And now their status is being changed. What does this new status mean? And what are some of the reasons for this decision?

So wolves have doubled in population since 2012 in the EU. There's now over 20,000 wolves across the continent. And this has made farmers very angry. We've seen an increase in attacks against livestock. And so the European Commission and the EU itself put forward a proposal to downgrade the status of the wolf from strictly protected to protected. And this means that there's going to be more flexibility for governments across the continent to

to allow for hunting of the wolves. And with this change in status, does it mean that farmers, for example, who might have a gun on their property, they can now shoot a wolf if it's attacking their livestock? It will still be a question of applying for a permit. It will just be a bit more flexible. I imagine that some conservationist groups are quite concerned about this because there have been so many efforts to grow the wolf population. What are they saying about the status?

Conservation groups are very angry. Over 300 conservation and animal rights groups have protested against this. There's a few arguments for that. The first one is that wolves do not attack humans. It should be seen as a conservation success story that we've managed to get the wolf back living amongst us. And there should be a focus on measures that would allow us to coexist instead of going straight back to hunting them.

There's also a political argument. The European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen, her pony was killed in 2022 by a wolf. And critics say that she has used that to...

try and get back at wolves. With this status change, do we know how it will actually affect their numbers? Not really. Critics argue that this new status won't even lead to a change in the numbers. One argument is that if you start hunting wolves, so if you kill one wolf from the pack, that pack will then split off and might attack even more livestock because of the chaos that's been created when you've interrupted the pack size.

So at this stage, it's hard to say if it will lead to less wolves in Europe. However, I spoke to someone from the Finnish Wildlife Agency who did say that there needed to be a better way of controlling the population. And so experts feel like these new protection measures may make it easier for them to have more of an idea of how to control the population sizes. Amelia, thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you.

That is all for this episode of What in the World from the BBC World Service. I don't know about you, but I found out that wolves aren't as deadly as I first thought. And that big bad wolf kind of bad boy image just isn't doing them any favours. That said, they can still be dangerous. So definitely don't go all Game of Thrones and pat a wolf to try to bond with it.

If you do feel like bonding with someone, though, you can always bond with us. We would love for you to subscribe on whatever platform you're listening to this right now. You can tell your friends and family about us and get in touch with us anytime. We're on WhatsApp, we're on Instagram, and now, of course, we're also on YouTube. I'm Hannah Gelbart, and we'll be back with another episode on Monday. But before that, on Sunday, the world is going to get a chance to see a full moon. And we all know what that means. Werewolves. Awoo!

*crying*

Available now on The Documentary from the BBC World Service, Stephen Coates takes you to the Morse Code World Championships. In an internet-connected world, Morse Code, the alphabet of dots and dashes, might now feel from a different era. I'm meeting some of the people who are keeping the code alive. Morse Code, ready to transmit. Listen now by searching The Documentary, wherever you get your BBC podcasts.