China Daily (Hong Kong)

France caught in war with wolves

-

SERON, France — Furtive, wily and the animal of fairy tales, wolves fascinate nature lovers, but they raise fears among French sheep breeders who are trying to save their flocks.

Amid debate in France on a future policy towards wolves, the government is being asked to come to the aide of sheep farming.

“In one night, we lost 10 percent of our flock,” said Claire Lapie, 32, a breeder in Sederon in the picturesqu­e southeast Drome department.

On the limestone hillsides dotted with shrubs, she has been raising sheep for three years with her companion Yann Rudant.

“A wolf attack, we knew one day it would happen to us. We accept the idea of ‘a share for the wolf’, one or two sheep, but finding 15 sheep eaten, slaughtere­d or dying — it’s a nightmare,” says Lapie.

For the young couple, who went into debt to acquire 150 sheep and build a vast sheepfold, they live in fear of new attacks.

sheep

Fear — as well as fascinatio­n — of wolves has historic roots fed by many children’s stories, including famous versions by the Brothers Grimm and Charles Perrault.

“When Charles Perrault wrote ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ in 1697, it was during the worst series of attacks by wolves with at least 500 children killed each year,” said Jean-Marc Moriceau, an historian of wolves in France.

The gray wolf was wiped out in the country in the 1930s and only returned in 1992 via Italy — currently home to around 2,000 wolves — then into Switzerlan­d and Germany.

Since the Bern Convention of 1979, the wolf has gone from public enemy to a protected species as “a fundamenta­l element of our natural European heritage”.

“But in the new zones of (wolf) colonizati­on — in France and in some regions of Italy and Spain — there are major tensions.”

In France, to curtail the predator’s progress and to try to appease the angry sheep farmers, the state has authorized since 2004 the killing of a certain number of wolves — 40 this year — but under strict conditions.

These authorized killings are considered too little by farmers who have called for greater latitude to fight predators which threaten their livelihood.

“It’s very discouragi­ng and distressin­g. We feel powerless,” says farmer Veronique Chauvet, who lost eight sheep in October.

She is near retirement but she worries about the future of five young farmers in her village of 220 inhabitant­s in southeast France.

Some defenders of the wolf also think the current approach is ineffectiv­e.

“You have to make a wolf learn not to interfere with the activities of sheep farming. But a dead wolf is a wolf which learned nothing,” says Benhammou.

France begins to debate its policy on the future of the wolf in Lyon on Tuesday.

“If this continues, in 10 years, sheep farming will disappear in our regions,” Chauvet says.

Newspapers in English

Newspapers from China