The Traunstein District Administrator Siegfried Walch never concealed the fact that, from his point of view, grazing cattle, sheep and other livestock and the re-colonization of Bavaria by wolves are mutually exclusive. Therefore – according to Walch’s credo – the predators must be kept away from Upper Bavaria and above all from the alpine pastures there. So it is in a certain way logical that Walch is now requesting the government of Upper Bavaria to have the wolf shot that killed five sheep near Bergen at the beginning of November. It is doubtful whether the CSU man will be successful with this. And not only because the wolf may have long been over the mountains and the Traunstein hunters could no longer get hold of him, even if they were allowed to. But mainly because the Bavarian “Wolf Action Plan” of 2019 provides for high hurdles for such a removal, as the shooting of a wolf is called in bureaucratic German.
Wolves are among the most strictly protected animals. According to European and German nature conservation law, they can only be shot in exceptional cases. First and foremost, this includes the protection of life and limb. As a rule, wolves are very shy of people and avoid any contact with them. Should there be encounters, it is usually a matter of chance contacts, the wolves stay at a distance and move away quickly. If a wolf doesn’t naturally shy away from people, wants to be close to them on its own initiative or even attack them, this is of course a reason to release it for shooting immediately.
The prerequisite for this, according to the Wolf Action Plan, is in any case “the existence of a specific danger”. Experts generally deny that such a thing is already there when a wolf – as with the cracks of mountains – is out and about near residential buildings at night. A spokesman for the State Office for the Environment (LfU) recently declared that it would be safe for the residents of a somewhat remote farm if a wolf roamed the farm at night. The LfU is the authority from which the decisive opinion comes as to whether a shooting application like that of the Traunstein District Administrator is justified or not.
According to the “Wolf Action Plan”, wolves can also be killed if a wolf attacks cattle, sheep or other farm animals and kills them or injures them seriously. However, the prerequisite for being shot down for this reason is that the animals were protected from wolf attacks or have stayed in mountain pastures, where the effort of protecting them cannot be expected of the farmers. The latter in particular has been massively criticized by environmental associations such as the Bund Naturschutz (BN). The best protection against wolves is considered to be stable defensive fences with electric wires and protection from underneath. In regions where wolves live, the Free State pays the farmers 100 percent of such massive protective fences.
In recent wolf attacks on farm animals it has of course been found very often that the existing fences around the farm animals were not suitable for securing them from the predators. A prime example of this are the attacks by the wolf pack in the Franconian Veldenstein Forest on two game gates in March 2021, in which 25 red deer, fallow deer and mouflon were killed. Since both gates were equipped with appropriately stable protective fences, the pack has avoided them. Herd guard dogs are also very good protection for farm animals. In any case, according to the “Action Plan Wolf”: A wolf may only be shot down because of an attack on farm animals if it is certain that the latter were adequately protected from the attacks or that their pasture could not be protected. A commission under the leadership of the LfU is responsible for the assessment.
In view of these hurdles, they are “fairly certain” with the BN, but also with the Society for the Protection of Wolves, that the initiative of the Traunstein District Administrator Walch will not be successful. But even if she had it, that would still not mean that the wolf could also be shot. At least at the BN, they are already saying that they will “examine a lawsuit against such a permit”.