Who’s Afraid of Europe’s Big, Bad Wolves?

Wolves, thanks to years of efforts at conservation, are back and often in places they haven’t been in ages. The wolf population in Europe has surged to nearly 20,000, partly as a result of the EU Habitats Directive, a 1992 policy that set out to protect the four-legged predator and other indigenous European wildlife. In Belgium, wolves recently returned after a century-long absence. In Scandinavia, Finland, Sweden, and Norway have granted hunters permission to cull small numbers. Similarly in France, the government this week released its National Wolf Plan, mildly relaxing laws protecting them.

The European Commission, the executive branch of the European Union, this month launched a bid to potentially slash wolf populations in response to growing pressure from an alliance of key conservative interest groups across the continent—farmers and people who have animals that get eaten by wolves.

“The concentration of wolf packs in some European regions has become a real danger for livestock and potentially also for humans,” von der Leyen said in early September. “I urge local and national authorities to take action where necessary.” 

If wolves are running wild today, they are all over European folklore. In Roman mythology, the founders of Rome, Romulus and Remus, were raised by a she-wolf. The monstrous wolf Fenrir, who killed Odin, is a key figure in the Norse tale of good versus evil, known as Ragnarok. The wolf is an antagonist in children’s fables, whether about the structural integrity of housing in “The Three Little Pigs” or intergenerational stresses in “Little Red Riding Hood” or the repercussions for a boy who peddled “fake news” in “The Boy Who Cried Wolf.” In the late 18th century, parts of Europe were in a panic about the Beast of Gévaudan, a legendary man-eating wolf-like creature marauding through France. 

A statue of a she-wolf suckling Romulus and Remus, who in Roman mythology founded Rome, is silhouetted against Rome’s Capitoline Hill circa 1965.David Lees/Getty Images

The EU’s recent move to address growing wolf populations is a significant change in tone from October 2021, when the bloc named the wolf an “integral part” of Europe’s biodiversity. Then again, last September, von der Leyen, a former German defense minister and member of the conservative Christian Democratic Union, lost her pony Dolly to a wolf attack near Hannover. A subsequent council order to shoot the male wolf, which had killed other animals in the area, expired in January. 

But politicians had their dander up. In November 2022, the European Parliament passed a motion calling for the downgrading of protections for the wolf. The nonbinding motion was driven by the group of conservative European parties known as the European People’s Party (EPP), the largest and most powerful alliance in Parliament and von der Leyen’s political home. 

Not everybody is lancing with wolves. Biodiversity experts such as Bruna Campos, a senior policy manager at EuroNatur, a German conservation NGO, disagree. “Wolves in Europe pose no threat to humans,” she said. “They do sometimes attack livestock, but there are already several known methods to massively reduce this threat,” she added, suggesting nonlethal techniques such as better fencing and random blasts of colorful light, noise, or motion. 

For conservationists, the booming wolf population is a success story, not a scapegoat for struggling farmers. 

In some ways, Europe’s wolf debacle is a familiar man-versus-nature conflict witnessed across the globe as natural habitats shrink and farmers, ranchers, and herders encroach evermore. From Alaska to Arizona, many U.S. states face increased bear attacks, while parts of Africa, such as Kenya, see pastoralists kill endangered lions to protect their livestock. In India, endangered Asian elephants kill around 500 people every year amid growing tensions with farmers and locals.

The body of a female wolf rests in the snow after being killed by hunters near Kristinehamn, Sweden, on Jan. 2, 2010. Olivier Morin/AFP via Getty Images

In Europe, though, the farmers have backup. Copa-Cogeca, the lobby group for European farmers that spends millions of euros every year to shape EU agricultural policy, welcomed Parliament’s lupine announcement as a means to combat the “tragedies occurring in our countryside.” The group did not respond to requests for further comment.

The need for a “strategic dialogue” on agriculture was a key pillar in von der Leyen’s State of the Union address on Sept. 13, where she specifically praised farmers, thanking them “for providing us with food day after day.”

With elections looming in less than a year, and with farmers up in arms and conservatives fearful they’ll lose seats to the far right, many argue that the cry about wolves is just cynical politics.

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“Europe has different and much bigger problems,” said Daniel Freund, a member of the European Parliament for the German Greens. “The EPP are probably trying to distract from the fact that they’re increasingly going into coalitions with postfascists and extreme-right parties.”

For others, solving the wolf problem is a lifestyle choice. Herbert Dorfmann is an Italian Eurodeputy who hails from the mountainous South Tyrol region. The wolf issue, he said, is not just about farmers and can’t be solved with electric fences.

“Just recently, a young citizen of my region lost his life because of an attack by a brown bear while jogging on a public forest path. School trips with children into nature are more and more canceled,” he said.

Others see a personal settling of scores by von der Leyen behind the sudden drive to shrink wolf populations. During a Dutch parliamentary debate on Sept. 7, for example, left-wing deputy Leonie Vestering accused von der Leyen of abusing her power for a “personal payback because one of her ponies fell victim to the wolf.” 

Sheep graze near the Eiffel Tower in Paris during a protest by farmers demanding an effective plan to fight wolves following an increasing number of attacks on livestock on Nov. 27, 2014. Michael Bunel/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Whatever the case, the issue highlights that when European farmers cry “wolf,” Brussels listens. 

The EU Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), the bloc’s signature farming subsidy program, is worth 270 billion euros (about $288 billion), one-third of its total budget. Through this, the EU gives a bit more than 60 billion euros to its farmers—while the sector only produced 1.3 percent of EU GDP in 2020. In 2021, the Economist outlined how farmers and Big Agriculture determine how Brussels really works, not unlike in the United States. Keeping farmers onside means jettisoning other EU priorities, such as fighting corruption.

For example, a 2019 New York Times investigation revealed how EU farming “[s]ubsidies have underwritten Mafia-style land grabs in Slovakia and Bulgaria,” while in “Hungary and much of Central and Eastern Europe, the bulk goes to a connected and powerful few.” EU subsidies for Dutch, German, and French farmers, via the CAP, have had a devastating impact on downstream countries’ ecosystems, biodiversity, and environment.

Just ask Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, who regularly protested the EU’s protection of farmers—in particular, how European agriculture is responsible for about 10 percent of the bloc’s greenhouse gas emissions yet remains exempt from efforts to make Europe carbon neutral by 2050. Moves to change that—making farmers responsible for their emissions as in other industries—next year have unleashed a political meltdown in the Netherlands, where a farmers’ party sent shockwaves across Europe with its landslide victory in elections in March, destabilizing the once-solid ground held by center-right political parties.

Gray wolves howl in the snow at a wildlife park in northern Norway on March 5, 2020. Wolfgang Kaehler/LightRocket via Getty Images

One of Sweden’s loudest anti-wolf voices is Kjell-Arne Ottosson, a deputy from the Christian Democrats. He said the whole countryside suffers while families “do not dare let their child play outside or go to the school bus alone.” This year, Swedish hunters were controversially allowed to kill 75 wolves from the estimated population of 460.

“As soon as a wolf approaches a metropolitan area, it is suddenly dangerous and is euthanized. Why isn’t it dangerous when it walks around my [rural] house?” Ottosson said.

The wolf debate follows a “rural-versus-urban fault line,” said Joachim Mergeay of the Brussels-based Research Institute for Nature and Forest, but more broadly symbolizes the threat of change many conservatives fear.

Mergeay said lightning strikes and disease cause far more livestock deaths than wolves.

“This is why wolves are so political: They are a symbol of the frustration of the loss of control that farmers and hunters and other rural people experience,” he said.