Brussels keeps wolves out of sight

An attempt by the environment minister, Miguel Arias Cañete, to extend the area in which the Iberian wolf can be legally hunted has been shot down by the European Commission.

On January 5, a large group of farmers, gathered together by the Asaja labor union, staged a protest in Valladolid against the animal. “Farming + wolves = ruin,” was the slogan of the march. The secretary of Asaja in Ávila, Joaquín Antonio Pino, says that farmers cannot survive the damage caused to their livelihoods by the wolf. “It’s been 100 years since there were wolves in Ávila, and now attacks on livestock are increasing. Where there were no wolves before they must be made to disappear because their presence is completely incompatible with stockbreeding.”

The Iberian wolf, which was confined to small pockets of Galicia, Zamora and Andalusia in the 1970s, has recovered. In 1992, the European Habitats Directive established that south of the Duero river — the creature’s natural barrier — the wolf should be “strictly protected.” North of the river, it could be hunted by quota. The objective of the conservation plan was to open a corridor between the northern population and the one in Andalusia’s Sierra Morena.

But the expansion of the Iberian wolf has increased conflict with farmers. Asaja estimates that in 2007 in Castilla y León, there were 400 attacks on livestock. In 2011, according to the association, that figure rose to 1,800, representing damages of some 1.5 million euros.

Cañete, in a meeting with EC Environment Commissioner Janez Potocnik on March 8, requested that the Iberian wolf’s status be altered to allow its hunting range to be extended. “The wolf is seriously affecting the livestock trade,” Cañete said at a subsequent press conference, adding that there was “a need to modify the directive.”

The commission responded that any change “to the habitats directive for a single species would only be possible within the framework of a more general revision aimed at including or removing multiple species based on scientific evidence and solid data.”

Brussels added that it had already commissioned “a report on what methodology will be useful in the future if it is decided to revise European directives on environmental protection.” Until that time comes — if it comes — the EU has reminded Spain that the current norm allows exceptions, “if no other satisfactory solution exists,” to protect livestock. In line with this, beating patrols by environment guards in Castilla y León have been carried out, but farmers say they are insufficient.

The matter is a running source of unrest in the region. In 2008, the regional government issued a decree allowing for wolves to be hunted south of the Duero, but the Castilla y León High Court annulled it a year later for violating European rules. In 2011, the Senate voted unanimously in favor of the hunting range’s extension.

Ecologists in Action, WWF and SEO/Birdlife consider Cañete’s petition to Brussels to be “completely mistaken.” Alberto Fernández, of the Association for the Conservation and Study of the Iberian Wolf, is playing down the scale of attacks. “It’s a puerile argument. Farmers have many problems, but according to the statistics, livestock deaths due to wolf attacks are 0.5 percent, a minimal amount.”

The problem in Castilla y León, unlike other regions in Spain with wolf populations, is that there is no compensation system for damage caused by wolves. It is a longstanding complaint of farmers in the region. “If society wants wolves, let them pay for them,” says Pino.

Furthermore, there are doubts over how many of the attacks on livestock are in fact the work of wolves. A 2010 study by investigators from the Doñana Biological Station, which is attached to the Superior Council of Scientific Studies, concluded that the majority of attacks attributed to wolves in the Basque Country had actually been carried out by feral dogs.

Jorge Echegaray, one of the authors of the study, says that “the existence of damage to livestock is not connected to the number of wolves but to the type of security at farms.” That is to say, guard dogs, fences and night patrols prevent attacks. “Ninety percent of Asturian farmers don’t even accumulate four annual claims for damages,” Echegaray says. “The evident evaluation is that the economic cost of the Iberian wolf on farming is more than manageable, and it is even possible to reduce it. Farmers have serious problems of various sorts but the wolf is not chief among them, although crying wolf is a good way of getting noticed.”

Echegaray warns that the battle to save the Iberian wolf is far from concluded. “The future of the species in Spain and Portugal depends on between 500 and 650 reproducing individuals distributed over at least 254 packs.” Additionally, the Iberian wolf today occupies only 25 percent of the habitat it had at the beginning of last century, when it was common throughout the peninsula.