No respite for wolves: new year, new massacres

An exemption to the protection of the species applied with no reflection

While wolves are protected by the Bern Convention and the European Union Habitats Directive, it is completely possible to slaughter them “to prevent significant damage particularly to crops, farms, forests, fisheries, water, and other types of property”, according to Article L. 411-2 of the Environmental Code.

In France, when shots have been authorised by prefectural decrees, wolves that approach herds can be killed without question. Never mind if the animals eliminated are not those who are directly involved in the attacks. Complete nonsense that is denied by our neighbours, who do everything they can to minimise the instability of packs and the impact that the lupine population has on conservation. The disappearance of a breeding male effectively destroys the social structure of the pack and increases the risk of its members dispersing, jeopardising their survival and increasing the risk of disruptive attacks by wolves operating alone from that point. But is it not the eventual aim of the French State, under pressure from lobbies, to further demonise wolves?

In Austria, only specifically designated wolves can be killed. They therefore make sure that the wolf that causes the attack will be slaughtered – a wolf who, let’s remember, does not kill for pleasure but out of necessity to feed itself. Killing another other animal is forbidden. An Austrian tribunal incidentally cancelled a shooting authorisation in December 2020, given that the risk of killing another wolf – that was not responsible for past attacks – was too high.

In Switzerland, wolves are not chosen randomly: it must be a young animal so as not to disturb the hierarchical configuration, on the condition that the pack has successfully reproduced, and only if said pack has killed at least ten livestock animals in four months.

In France, the number of individuals slaughtered is constantly growing. Until this policy exterminating wolves ends, One Voice will ensure that the (minimal) conditions necessary to obtain a destruction authorisation are followed, which unfortunately is not always the case.

Two weeks after the start of the new year, two wolves have already been killed by hunters

The killing of wolves is monitored by the DREAL [Direction régionale de l’Environnement, de l’Aménagement et du Logement – Regional Directorate for the Environment, Development, and Housing] in Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, who would rather put these killings down under the pleasant description of “an intervention protocol for the wolf population”, probably to try and minimise the severity and make people believe that, as their name suggests, they are concerned about the environment.

In 2023, 174 wolves could therefore be slaughtered completely legally. Scarcely twenty days after the start of the new year, this was already the case for two of them: the first in the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence Department due to derogation shots, the second “deliberately destroyed outside of the protocol” (poached, in reality), somewhere in France with no further precision, as the DREAL tracking chart shows.

About a year ago, we challenged two agricultural unions who called on their members to poach wolves, bragging about having “bullets and poison”. However, “incitement to commit an offence harming a protected species” is only a crime if it is followed by a result (an individual kills a wolf in response to the union’s incitement). This lack of violation is highly contestable. An amendment was filed against this scandal under the Biodiversity law framework, but was unfortunately rejected…

There has been no information on the first two victims of 2023 in the media. On the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence Prefecture’s website there is no more information on the wolf concerned but there is a call for applications to appoint a wolf-hunting lieutenant who will participate, among other things, “in operations provided for in the ‘wolf’ protocol” – including: “will participate in the killing of wolves”.

Wolves are animals with complex emotional intelligence. But according to the State, they are simply heads to be cut off to please hunters who only think about nature and its wildlife in the context of the prism of immediate profits that they can derive from it. We are still here, despite the catastrophic situation in which biodiversity finds itself.

It is all the more despicable that no scientific study has shown that killing wolves would significantly reduce their impact on farm animals, who, let’s not forget, will end up at the abattoir after a (short) life of being exploited in an over-grazed environment.

Translated from the French by Joely Justice