From this Tuesday at zero o’clock sharp, all hunters and foresters along the edge of the Alps in south-eastern Upper Bavaria are allowed to hunt down the male wolf roaming there with the official name GW2425m – at least until further notice. Because against the decision of the government of Upper Bavaria, which was announced on Friday and published shortly before 9 p.m. on Monday evening, the Bund Naturschutz (BN) and the Society for the Protection of Wolves have announced a lawsuit at the Munich Administrative Court. According to the BN, it wants to apply for an urgent decision in the hope that the court will collect the order, with which the government has allowed the first shooting of a wild wolf in Bavaria for 140 years, as quickly as possible.
What now sounds like a kind of race between hunters and plaintiffs might not turn out to be too urgent. That is when the wolf has long since moved on after killing several sheep, goats and wild animals in the region at the end of last year, was met by a farmer in the goat pen and was filmed by an eyewitness while roaming through the town of Bergen at night.
Because the animal has repeatedly stayed in the immediate vicinity of inhabited houses and is apparently looking for proximity to settlement structures, a commission of experts convened by the State Office for the Environment has spoken out in favor of the shooting, as the Traunstein District Administrator Siegfried Walch (CSU) requested in November and how Agriculture Minister Michaela Kaniber (CSU) and Environment Minister Thorsten Faithr (FW) had recently called for him.
Herd protection measures for livestock are not sufficient to rule out a danger to humans, given the fact that wolves have become accustomed to human settlements, the government said on Monday evening. There are no reasonable alternatives to shooting down, because scaring the animal away is almost impossible given its large radius of action. Catching it and locking it in an enclosure is not animal welfare friendly.
The decree applies to those parts of the three districts of Traunstein, Rosenheim and Berchtesgadener Land that lie south of the A8 and east of the A93, with the exception of the Berchtesgaden National Park. She had been awaited with impatience by many throughout Monday – including Uwe Friedel, the wolf expert for the Federal Nature Conservation Agency. He was still “relatively relaxed,” said Friedel during the day, because there has been no secure trace of the Traunsteiner wolf since December 19.
“Either he’s already dead, he’s well hidden, or he’s already somewhere else.” After all, he agrees with the chairman of the Traunstein district group in the Bavarian Hunting Association, Josef Freutsmiedl. “We don’t know whether he’s still there,” said Freutsmiedl before the decision was published. Because the forest areas in the region are extensive. The border to neighboring Austria, which is also mountainous, is long and not important, at least for wolves.
In a statement on behalf of the approximately 800 members of the hunting association in Traunstein, Freutsmiedl clearly spoke out in favor of the shooting. Otherwise there are “no major problems” with wolves, but this one animal is a “problem wolf” that needs to be removed.
Freutsmiedl expressly does not like to talk about “hunting”, because wolves are under strict protection and are not subject to hunting law in Bavaria. “I certainly won’t shoot him,” stresses Freitsmiedl for this reason and also because he doesn’t want to be hunted by animal lovers in a figurative sense like those who are said to have shot the “problem bear” Bruno in 2006 – the last protected predator that was shot in Bavaria with permission.
Some wolves used to humans, which the Bavarian Forest National Park had killed in 2017 after unknown persons had released them from an enclosure, were not legally considered wild animals, but property of the national park.
“Every hunter has to decide for himself whether someone wants to shoot this wolf,” says Freutsmiedl. The administrative court must now decide.