Food & Drink
7 July 2021
Human persecution is already the leading cause of death for thousands of wolves every year in Europe, yet the true scale remains unknown because systematic monitoring and reporting are absent.
NGOs are now calling for full transparency and disclosure of the vested interests behind the EU’s proposed wolf downlisting, which is generating more unjustified killing in contradiction to EU rules.
While the European Environmental Agency (EEA) reports that two-thirds of the species protected under the Habitats Directive in the EU have poor or bad conservation status, and science says that wolves in Europe have not reached a favourable conservation status, the European Commission has been pushing for downlisting– meaning more wolf killing.
A ‘zero quota’ of killing is now the only lawful way for Member States to comply with EU legislation. Science is unequivocal: wolves in Europe remain at risk; downlisting is a political decision.
Campaigners warn that the anti-science wolf-downlisting manoeuvre promoted by Ursula von der Leyen, by means of a 2023 report produced by a Brussels-based consultancy commissioned and funded by the European Commission, unlocks a deeply concerning chapter in the making of the EU environmental governance.
NGOs are calling for full transparency about the influence of undisclosed private interests on EU decision-making. They warn that these actors are pushing the EU Executive and several Member States to dismantle long-standing and effective nature-protection laws while promoting a misleading ‘coexistence’ narrative that likely serves agri‑hunting lobbies.
EU environmental legislation should not be built on a scientific and legal vacuum, reshaped to justify the killing or mistreatment of wild animals. This is why three NGO legal Appeals were filed before the European Court of Justice to challenge the EU downlisting. These may lead to the reversal of the recent decision to downlist the wolf; rulings are still awaited.
Member States still have the authority to reject this course and uphold strict protection in line with the will of their citizens, rather than EU‑driven policies shaped by undisclosed interests. Those who have already downlisted wolves can still set a zero‑kill quota, fully consistent with EU and international rules. Portugal, the Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary and other countries announced they will do so.
Far from the bureaucratic desks in Brussels, downgrading wolf protection has one concrete consequence: the liberalisation of wolf killing. It normalises violence against wildlife by expanding the routine use of guns and bullets as the main management tools.
This marks an unjustifiable step backwards of nearly 50 years – despite repeated opposition from European citizens, whose voices have been consistently sidelined.
Losses due to wolf predation are estimated at 0.06/0.07% only of the total sheep and goat population in the EU; the rest is political narrative.
The wrong side of killing wolves is explained by data: wild mammals, including all large land and marine animals (whales, elephants, lions, wolves, etc.), represent only a very small fraction (about 4%) of the total biomass of mammals left on the planet. Approximately 96% of the biomass of all existing mammals (out of approximately 7,000 species) consists of humans (34%) and domestic animals raised for food or other human needs (62%).
A bullet entering an animal’s body is never painless. Fear, suffering and mistreatment inflicted on sentient wildlife are the silent consequences of the policy approach the European Commission is actively promoting, in contradiction of the EU Treaty and the Constitution of several Member States.
Often, military‑style operations are organised for killing these ‘protected’ animals; these involve large technology‑assisted teams, equipped with GPS, radios, night‑vision, thermal imaging, trained dogs and sometimes even drones with heat-sensing cameras.
Wolves may be persecuted for long distances for several days, during day and night, before being shot; their suffering is not reported. This is the real side of promoting the killing of wolves.
Presented as ‘Coexistence’, the concept is largely empty of binding rules: it provides no enforceable safeguards for protected species and therefore amounts to little more than a tolerance regime with wide margins for killing.
Like humans, wolves are part of the biosphere – an interconnected system of life that depends on natural resources. This fragile balance is now severely compromised by the intensity of human activities, which place growing pressure on nature and its species.
There is no EU obligation to adopt preventive measures against predation, despite the fact that the EU already allocates millions of euros each year to support such measures alongside compensation schemes for livestock losses.
At the same time, millions more continue to flow through the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) to specific agricultural and hunting interests, undermining the wolf’s natural role as a bioregulator and ecosystem engineer.
In several EU countries and regions, CAP and LIFE+ funds available for preventive measures are not even requested by farmers, and when they are allocated they often remain unused or partly used.
The costs of having large carnivores do not need to be high if livestock are kept in appropriate ways.
When considering the number of sheep (c. 31 million) present in the EU sample countries, these levels of depredation correspond to the annual killing of 0.06% (wolves), 0.004% (bears) and 0.001% (lynx).
The most effective measures to protect livestock involve robust electric fencing on already fenced pastures and nighttime gathering of livestock into carnivore-proof enclosures, and the use of shepherds with livestock guarding dogs on open pastures.
It is not possible to only rely on lethal control as this will not provide long-term solutions, nor be compatible with conservation legislation.
It is possible to reduce the impact of wolf depredation to economically acceptable and socially tolerable levels, through the appropriate adaptation of breeding systems and the correct adoption of preventive measures.
Neither the Commission nor the Member States have ever collected the most basic data: the real extent of wolf mortality across Europe. How many wolves die in the EU each year? No one knows.
We are likely speaking of tens of thousands of animals killed through shooting, poisoning or road collisions – events that remain largely undocumented and therefore invisible in the decision‑making process. These missing numbers pose a serious risk to wildlife conservation in Europe, yet they are not factored into assessments of the species’ conservation status – nor are they accounted for by public authorities before more killing is authorised.
The same gap applies to the absence of a European methodology for data collection, which makes national monitoring systems difficult to compare and undermines any coherent EU‑wide evaluation.
According to science, the growth rate of wolf populations does not increase indefinitely. On the contrary, where we are close to reaching optimal density, the reproductive rate approaches zero.
This is the case, for example, in the Western Alps where, despite a significant presence of the wolf, there is a very modest growth rate of 1.04. The hypotheses put forward by many in the agricultural sector and hunting world regarding the unstoppable growth in wolf numbers are therefore unfounded.
All scientific studies and major European reports converge on one point: most wolves that die in Europe are killed by humans through hunting, derogation culls, poaching, poisoning and road collisions.
And what about the ‘authorised’ killing carried out for years in Finland, Sweden, France, Spain, Slovakia, and other Member States?
They often took place in open contradiction with European environmental law, without any effective intervention from the European Commission, despite the several Judgements of the European Court of Justice clarifying the legal framework for strict protection applying in the EU.
The systematic tolerance of these practices has contributed to normalising lethal management, further eroding the safeguards that EU law is meant to guarantee.
The Commission’s new approach sends a troubling signal: the current level of wolf mortality – driven by poaching, poisoning, traffic collisions and even hunting practices that contradict EU law – is implicitly deemed insufficient, despite the fact that it remains entirely unmonitored. The EU Executive appears to be paving the way for further increases in wolf killing. The question remains: to what end?
What lies behind the remarkable investment of time and resources that the EU bureaucracy as a whole has devoted to securing the liberalisation of wolf killing?
In practice, this risks reviving a past of ignorance many believed Europe had left behind; armed individuals moving through forests, landscapes, river valley, and mountain areas, lakes and even private land, shooting animals whose ecological role is both central and indispensable.
Ecological evidence shows that Europe could naturally sustain well over 200,000 wolves. Yet by the 1970s, the species had been reduced to near‑extinction in most of Western Europe. Today, the EU population stands at roughly 20,000 individuals, an order of magnitude below its natural potential.
These are the very same animals for which, since the 1980s, the EU has chosen to invest hundreds of millions of euros through conservation projects for wolves and habitats, initiatives that have generated richer habitats, a renewed appreciation for wildlife, new skills, employment opportunities, scientific knowledge, transnational cooperation and genuine progress within local communities.
Since the 1980s, the wolf has started progressively to recover from extinction due to these public investments; today, the species remains at risk.
The Court of Justice of the European Union has repeatedly affirmed the following main principles: the Habitats Directive is an ecological law rooted in science; favourable conservation status should be secured nationally before any removal is authorised and lethal management methods are permissible only as a last resort.
Given the current legal and scientific data, a zero‑kill quota is now the only viable exit strategy for Member States. Wolf recovery from extinction is presently progressing; the present move toward weakening strict protection for wolves will reverse these gains and place the species at further risk.
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