What the visitors from the state capital say to them, the listeners up here already know for a long time. It is exactly what they have been bugging the state government for weeks and months: that the wolf does not belong here because the alpine pastures in the mountains simply cannot be protected against predators. That the pastures would soon overgrow without grazing cows, sheep and goats. And that that would not only mean the loss of the rural livelihood, the native cultural landscape and the economic factor of tourism, but also the loss of many other protected animal and plant species.
Well, and that’s what Bavaria’s Prime Minister Markus Söder, State President Ilse Aigner (both CSU), Economics Minister Hubert Aiwanger and Environment Minister Thorsten Faithr (both FW) said here above Oberaudorf in the Rosenheim district on Wednesday morning, so the wolf must be allowed to be shot , as soon as one lays hands on grazing animals.
Söder, Aigner, Aiwanger, Glauber and a number of others repeated all of this here at the artificial pond below the Bichlersee mountain inn, because on Saturday, just a few meters away, two sheep and a dead deer were found in a damp depression and the day then another sheep. That it really was a wolf and not a dog that killed the animals has not yet been proven by a genetic analysis of the tracks on the carcasses, but neither the dozens of local residents and alpine farmers nor the politicians who have come leave any doubt that that the laboratory result expected in a few days at the earliest will be exactly the same. In addition, it was without a doubt a bear, which in turn a few days earlier and a few meters away had killed two sheep and injured a third so badly that it had to be put out of its suffering.
Since then, there has been a lot of excitement in the Bavarian Alps, and anger is growing with the alleged wolf tears. And because on Tuesday evening the Prime Minister had also announced the date originally announced by the two FW ministries, the upsurge of alpine farmers with felt hats and media people in functional clothing on Wednesday was so great that the police had to block access via the narrow mountain road .
Photos of sheep killed in the region were also displayed in a pasture.
(Photo: Peter Kneffel/dpa)
The members of the cabinet did not come to the angry peasants empty-handed. The Council of Ministers passed an ordinance just the day before, according to which all wolves in a region can be released for shooting by the respective district office after the first crack. The hunter must “be able to sit down there that same night and shoot the wolf with a night vision device,” says Aiwanger to great applause in Oberaudorf. Occasionally, cowbells even rang, although most Oberaudorf alpine farmers have not yet driven out their cattle and ask themselves every day how long the fodder will last in the barn.
The Bund Naturschutz (BN) has already announced that it will take legal action against the ordinance and is clearly more confident than the state government. The Rosenheim BN district chairman Rainer Auer also drove up to the Bichlersee on Wednesday and had to put up with harsh accusations there. Auer regards the meeting on the mountain as “purely an election campaign event” and affirms that the state government’s decree as a violation of European nature conservation law “will of course be brought down in court”.
Aiwanger, on the other hand, only makes “a major appeal to those who complain and who ultimately make the judge’s decision: We must not let it get to the point where the population here loses faith in the rule of law”. Otherwise, Aiwanger suggests, this population could possibly take the law into their own hands. From his point of view, the state government has done something similar anyway. Because Brussels and Berlin do not want to relax the strict protection of the wolf, they are “forced to enforce their own Bavarian law here”. Someone who wants to do this soon stands diagonally behind and is satisfied. The Garmisch-Partenkirchen District Administrator Anton Speer (FW), who applied for a general shooting permit for wolves from the government of Upper Bavaria weeks ago, is responsible for this himself according to the new regulation from May 1st, but sees himself as far from the goal .
The “removal” of wolves must be made easier
As a precaution, the Prime Minister is once again making demands on the EU and the federal government to reduce protection for wolves throughout Europe. “The conservation status of the wolf is now so good that we have to reckon with significant pack formation – not only here, but elsewhere,” says Söder. The “removal” of wolves must be made easier before the population keeps growing and more and more specimens have to be removed to regulate them. As far as the legal assessment is concerned, Söder has declared that “now he doesn’t feel like saying anything anymore, because there may be a risk of legal action, because there may be a concern that something could happen, we don’t dare to make any decisions at all”. Because, as Söder has said on previous occasions: “The wolf doesn’t belong here.”
This is how the Rosenheim district farmer, Katharina Kern, for example, or the Oberaudorf local chairman in the farmers’ association, Sepp Steinmüller, see it. Or Simone Braun, the landlady of the Gasthof Bichlersee, who, after the bear’s first appearance, had to reassure many concerned callers about the reserved rooms and finally had to explain to the guests about the sheep carcasses that had been eaten down there on the meadow. And I’ve already called Andre Sigl twice, to whom the sheep belonged and who now has to bottle-feed an orphaned lamb and, in his own words, has been in a state of emergency for days, as if he didn’t have enough work to do. He doesn’t need any fences or money from the Free State, says Sigl, he just doesn’t need a wolf. Aiwanger suspects that some city dwellers need this wolf and tells them immediately: They should “keep the animals in Munich that they want to keep”.