Snow still falls again and again in the Bavarian Alps. It’s still a few weeks before the farmers drive their cattle, sheep and goats up to the alpine pastures. But some have long been playing publicly with the idea of leaving their animals in the valley this summer so as not to hand them over to wolves, which could roam the mountains individually or even form a pack, as in the area around Garmisch-Partenkirchen. The local district administrator Anton Speer (FW) submitted an application to the government of Upper Bavaria in mid-March for easier shooting of the previously strictly protected wolves.
This Friday, the Miesbach District Administrator Olaf von Löwis (CSU) included the demand in an open letter to Environment Minister Thorsten Faithr (free voters). On behalf of the local alpine farmers, Löwis demands that the federal government press the EU Commission to downgrade the current maximum protection status for wolves. He justifies the demand with the fact that effective protection of the herds of cattle, for example with fences in the mountains, is hardly possible. He also writes that the alpine cultural landscape is dependent on pastoralism. Without them, the mountain pastures would overgrow, and with it the habitat of many other animal and plant species that are also protected, such as the wolf, which Löwis believes is no longer endangered in Europe, would disappear.
At Glauber, Löwis should run into open doors. “Effective herd protection is simply not possible in the mountains,” said the Environment Minister recently on the occasion of the presentation of appropriate fences and other facilities by the two state institutes for agriculture (LfL) and for the environment (LfU). “That’s why we need the possibility for efficient wolf management on the alpine pastures.” The federal government must finally accept that. Such wolf management must include the possibility of shooting down wolves that attack and kill sheep or other farm animals on the alpine pastures. “Otherwise we will never get the alpine farmers to tolerate the return of the wolves,” says the Minister for the Environment. “Let alone that we get peace in the alpine regions.”
Of course, it doesn’t look like the advances from Bavaria will be successful quickly. Federal Environment Minister Steffi Lemke (Greens) and eleven other environment ministers from EU member states strictly rejected such efforts in a joint letter to the EU Commission at the beginning of February. The background was a resolution of the EU Parliament in November 2022, in which the majority of MEPs supported the call for a reduction in wolf protection. “We, the Environment Ministers, at a time of global biodiversity crisis, unequivocally reject the resolution’s tendency to weaken legal protections for wolves,” read the letter from Lemke and her colleagues. At the same time, they emphasize the “indispensable role” of wolves in regulating wildlife populations.