The EU just made it easier to hunt wolves. What happens now?

For many of us, encounters with wolves reside in the realms of children’s games and fairy tales – Little Red Riding Hood and The Boy Who Cried Wolf spring to mind.

Each features a scary and unpredictable figure who sneaks up on us, or who we sneak up on, heart pumping and legs ready to run.

Primal fear of apex predators runs deep – even in the Anthropocene, when attacks on humans by creatures like wolves, sharks and crocodiles are extremely rare.

In fact, there were just 25 recorded deaths from wolf attacks worldwide between 2002 and 2020, with 14 of those attributed to rabies.

To put that in perspective, a person in wolf country is more likely to be killed by a dog, lightning, a bee sting or a car collision with a deer than to be injured by a wolf.

Yet, as wolf populations rebound in Europe due to changing land use and effective protection measures, policymakers have been pushed to react. Unfortunately, their decisions are often more informed by stereotypes than by science.

Eurasian wolves (Canis lupus lupus) were historically widespread across Europe. However, as agriculture intensified, they became increasingly persecuted due to fears of livestock predation and attacks on humans.

By the end of World War II, they were extinct in all of Central Europe and most of Northern Europe. But as traditional pastoral and rural economies declined across the continent, wolf populations began to rebound throughout the second half of the 20th century.

How a dead pony changed everything

In 1992, the biodiversity-focused EU Habitats Directive was adopted, and wolves were placed under ‘strict protection’ – meaning that individuals could only be killed or captured if they posed a specific threat to livestock, health or safety.

Since then, Europe’s wolf population has surged to around 20,000, colonizing numerous areas where they haven’t been for a very long time. In Belgium, for instance, they recently returned after a 100-year absence.

This resurgence has had positive impacts for both farmers and ecosystems. Wolves tend to prey on sick animals, such as deer with Lyme disease, preventing it from spreading. They also control wild herbivore populations, which can boost vegetation growth and biodiversity.

Yet their return has also sparked controversy. Most farmers aren’t well-versed in protecting their livestock from wolf attacks. Fences often prove inadequate for the animals’ agility and intellect, and mobile pastoralists have lost the practices that used to keep their herds and flocks safe, like training dogs as protectors.

In 2022, the pet pony of European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen was killed by a wolf in Germany, fueling the fire of conservative calls to ease wolf protections.

Those calls culminated in December 2024, when EU member states voted to downgrade the protection of wolves from ‘strictly protected’ to ‘protected’ under the Bern Convention on the Conservation of European Wildlife and Natural Habitats, a 1979 international treaty that works in concert with the Habitats Directive.

This new status lowers the threshold for when wolves can be culled, clearing the way for EU member states to set their own hunting quotas.

In Slovakia, can farmers and wolves coexist?

How might such a move impact national policies and populations?

Let’s zoom in on the situation in Slovakia as an example. There, wolves mostly live in the Carpathian Mountains, which span almost 60 percent of the country’s surface area, though they were once found in lowland areas, too.

“Wolves have always been a unique feature of culture here in Slovakia,” says Milan Janák, nature conservation manager at WWF-Slovakia.

“You can find lots of surnames and place names that reference them, and you’ll see them in the coats of arms of some places – not only in mountain regions, but also in the lowlands. It was a widespread species, and as such, as a carnivore and as a top predator, it was always hunted.”

In the past, wolf hunting was a privilege afforded only to royalty and nobility, so farmers and shepherds had to find other ways to keep their animals safe.

“The tradition of shepherding in our region, and in all of the Carpathians, actually developed in coexistence with wolves and with other large carnivores such as brown bears,” says Janák.

“So there are, for instance, these local breeds of dogs that were used for protecting sheep and other domestic animals against these large carnivores.”

But as sheep farming expanded and intensified, Slovakia’s wolves were hunted and lost habitat, and their populations declined, so too did farmers’ knowledge about how to coexist alongside them.

The country joined the EU in 2004 and became subject to its rules on wolf protection, but it maintained a two-and-a-half-month hunting season and quota. This drew concerns from neighboring countries because of the likely impacts on their own wolf populations.

These policies did not serve farmers, however. A 2024 study found no correlation between wolf hunting and livestock losses between 2014 and 2019, concluding that “there is no merit in the previous justification for this conservation compromise to reduce livestock losses.”

In fact, culling wolves can actually lead to greater livestock losses because it splinters wolf packs, prompting those left behind to prey on livestock instead of wild animals as they are easier to catch.

Faced with mounting evidence in this vein, Slovakia’s Ministry for the Environment began to push for change.

In 2021, wolves gained year-round protection – albeit with exceptions for hunting individual, problematic wolves like the one that killed von der Leyen’s pony Dolly, which seems to have developed a taste for livestock.

Quotas a “setback for conservation”, say wolf advocates

Yet in January this year, immediately after the EU announced its protection downgrade, the Slovak government reinstated a quota for wolf hunting and extended the hunting period to five-and-a-half months.

“Hunting wolves should be the last option for dealing with livestock damage,” says Katarína Butkovská, senior policy manager at WWF-Slovakia. “But this system is not focusing on individuals that are genuinely linked to livestock damage – it’s a general quota.”

Butkovská argues the decision “was not based on science and is a significant setback for conservation: it seems to be more of a political decision at both national and EU levels, which, from our perspective, is very unsystematic and putting our ecosystems at risk.”

“It goes against the basic principles of the Bern Convention, which has been developed and monitored very carefully over the past 50 years,” she adds.

Janák says it makes more sense to reinstate year-round protection for wolves, with preventative measures to make livestock losses less likely.

Alongside the existing government compensation for animals killed by wolves, he wants to see more support for breeding and training shepherd dogs, which were widely used to deter wolves in the past, as well as newer measures like effective electric fences, as well as light and noise deterrents.

“What we are trying to do is to get information to farmers: to educate them that there are ways to protect their livestock without culling wolves, and that they can actually coexist with these animals and even benefit from them being there,” says Janák.

This kind of practical advocacy is critical, though some conservationists in the region also promote a less anthropocentric view of why wolf populations deserve protection.

“You need to ask if everything has to have a positive effect on the way we see it as humans,” said Jan Gouwy, a researcher from the Flemish Institute for Nature and Forest Research (INBO), in an interview with the BBC.

“Maybe some animals just have a right to exist, not just because we find them useful.”