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Brussels is on a mission to make wolves fair game for hunters. Campaigners and legal experts say it’s making a huge mistake.
The European Commission on Wednesday said it wants to change the conservation status of wolves from “strictly protected” to “protected.” If it get its way, wolf-hunting will be authorized in the EU.
While the Commission says its decision is based on “new data on increased populations and impacts,” environmental campaigners warn President Ursula von der Leyen is throwing away environmental protections to garner favor among her own political group — the center-right European People’s Party (EPP).
“Today’s proposal from the Commission to lower the protection status of wolves under the international law is an early Christmas present to von der Leyen’s political family,” said Sergiy Moroz, a policy manager at the European Environmental Bureau.
“The proposal is neither justified by science nor supported by public opinion,” he added.
Von der Leyen’s EPP has sounded the alarm about a growing number of wolf attacks in recent months, portraying itself as defending farmers’ interests in Brussels ahead of next year’s European elections. The Commission president’s own pony was killed by a wolf in Germany last year, which “horribly distressed” her “whole family,” she said in a statement after the attack.
Campaigners say the Commission’s proposal has been rushed through on a shaky scientific basis with limited input from civil society. Lawyers at legal charity ClientEarth warned it “lacks proper substantiation” and sets a “dangerous precedent” for environmental protection and the rule of law at large.
“Opening a law and tinkering under the bonnet when it seems convenient sets a really poor precedent — and should raise the alarm about how well protected nature really is,” said ClientEarth’s Agata Szafraniuk. “If this proposal goes through, it would be a horrendous signal for how the Commission responds to ambitious nature policies and laws when they’re actually successful.”
The move is also likely to split EU countries, which would need to sign off the proposal with a qualified majority before it can be submitted for approval by the international Bern Convention committee. While the European Parliament has adopted a resolution that backs the Commission’s move, 12 EU environment ministers earlier this year urged the Commission to protect the species.
Leading the charge, former Slovak Environment Minister Ján Budaj had called on Brussels to “keep the same responsible approach to the protection of rare species as it has done up to now.”
Tasting blood
The Commission insists its decision is based on an “in-depth analysis” of the status of the wolf in the EU, which found that damage to livestock has increased as the European wolf population has grown. Von der Leyen, too, has argued “the concentration of wolf packs in some European regions has become a real danger especially for livestock.”
But the analysis also shows that in the German federal states with the highest number of wolves, the rate of wolf attacks on livestock “has decreased significantly in recent years, which was associated to the use of adequate preventive measures.”
It says that while the impact of wolves on rural communities “can be high in certain areas” the “overall impact of wolves on livestock in the EU is very small.”
The proposal is a major victory for the EU’s hunter lobby — and has emboldened it to ask for more.
Even as the European Federation for Hunting and Conservation welcomed Wednesday’s announcement, it called on Brussels to now consider changes to the protection status of other large carnivores — specifically bears and lynxes.
“To ensure successful coexistence, we also need a large carnivore package” with a focus on revising the protection status of the bear and the lynx, said Torbjörn Larsson, the federation’s president.
NGOs say that’s unacceptable.
“As soon as [von der Leyen] has gone after the wolf, the hunters ask for the heads of bears and lynx as well,” said BirdLife Europe Director Ariel Brunner, who warned Brussels will come to regret the strategy. “The European public is ever less happy about killing animals for fun. [The Commission is] riding the culture war into a dead end.”
“Stop this nonsense,” Austrian Green MEP Thomas Waitz wrote on X. “The wolf does not threaten children or grandmothers in the forest; they are vital for our biodiversity and forests. Instead of giving in to populism we should work on solutions to help farmers adapt to a peaceful coexistence.”
A Commission spokesperson for the environment declined to comment.
