When Is It Right to Kill a Wolf?
Usually, after a night of carnage, the phone rings early in the morning. It sounds first at the Departmental Directorate for Territorial Affairs, or DDT, in an eyesore of a governmental building on the outskirts of Digne, a small town nestled between the lavender fields of Provence and the sharp peaks of the Alps. The farmer on the line is usually distraught, recounting how many sheep were mauled and how the wolves attacked. Was there just one or a whole pack? Did they jump the electric fence, fight off the guard dogs? As the farmer tells his story, a government employee issues an alert, and the administrative procedure starts rolling.Sébastien Dubois takes it from there. As a royal wolf-catcher, Dubois is the latest in a centuries-long line of guardians entrusted by the rulers of France to rid the country of troublesome wolves. They did so in the 800s under the Emperor Charlemagne, and they do so in 2025 under the local prefects. Long gone are the gold-trimmed uniforms, the silver hunting knives, the throngs of hound dogs; now it’s technical outerwear, thermal cameras, high-tech rifles with night vision scopes—and tons of paperwork.Dubois starts his missions with paperwork, too. He does a background check: Does the farmer qualify for wolf-catchers’ protection? Does he have the appropriate authorizations? If all the boxes are checked, Dubois goes to the farm, sometimes hiking for hours to remote Alpine locations. He arrives long before sunset so that he can scout the terrain. He checks the weather, the direction of the wind, and the distance to the nearest woods. He checks the wolves’ tracks and the position of the neighboring houses. Then he waits.Often he stays out all night, always within 1,000 feet of the flock (the rules again). Usually, he hunts alone. He prefers it that way. It allows him to focus on the animal, immerse himself in its mind. “I shoot wolves, yes—that’s the job,” he told me. “But I respect them. We humans, we are fools compared to them. They are always one step ahead.”Most nights, he doesn’t fire a single shot. He strikes only when the wolves are close and about to attack. One time they were preparing to charge an exhausted sheepdog that had been barking up wolves every night for a week. “The dog was drained,” Dubois remembered. “It had lain down. And I saw the wolf; it was mid-attack. I think I shot it just before it pounced.”France is at a dangerous point. There is just too little land and too much bloody history for human-wolf relationships to be easily settled.With his slight frame, in jeans and a polo shirt, Dubois doesn’t look like someone you’d describe with the words “royal” or “wolf-catcher.” Yet over the last five years he has probably spent more than 100 nights hunting wolves, killing many. (He doesn’t like to keep count, he told me.) About 20 of those nights were at a farm owned by Julien Giraud, a stout, middle-aged man with a weathered face and hands cracked from years of fieldwork. When I visited in April, the place was postcard-perfect. Snowy peaks on the horizon framed rolling fields of shortly cropped lavender. The air smelled of dry grass and sun-heated soil. Dozens of sheep grazed behind an electric fence, watched over by a giant tan dog appropriately named Simba, Swahili for lion.The scene may have been peaceful, but Giraud’s voice was tense. Everything changed on June 16, 2019, he told me. More than 100 sheep killed in three nights—a massacre. When his daughter woke up for school, there were dead bodies all around the house. She was only four at the time. “It was horrible,” Giraud said. To protect the sheep, he started sleeping in his car, which he parked near the flock. In five months, he stayed home only a couple of times. He’s not sure why his wife hasn’t left him. “These dates are burned into my memory,” he said, and started to cry.That June, Dubois came over to Giraud’s farm many times. He slept in the car near the flock, too, so that Giraud could go home, get some rest. To the farmer, Dubois is a friend, a helping hand. Yet to many others, especially those on the political left, the wolf-catcher is a symbol of all things wrong: human dominance over nature, speciesism, pointless killings. There are about 1,700 wolf-catchers in France, and some have faced threats and hate mail, Dubois said. He asked me not to use his real name because he felt it would be too risky. He wanted to protect his family.Across Europe, conflicts over wolves have intensified in recent years, and the situation in France is particularly dire. You are either pro-wolf (protect it at all costs), or anti-wolf (get rid of it), with little in between. Fake news proliferates. Wolves have been used as a scapegoat for farmers’ struggles by French politicians, and as a bargaining chip during farmers’ protests. In the United States, tensions flared after wolves were reintroduced into Yellowstone National Park and then Idaho in the mid-1990s, after a decades-long absence. But there are less than half as many wolves in the contiguous United States and far more land. It’s possible to let them roam national parks and other nature preserves, where they’ll have little interaction with humans. “The situation in Europe is much more complicated,” said Dries Kuijper, a wildlife ecologist at the Polish Academy of Sciences. There’s just not enough space for humans and wolves to avoid each other. The land has to be shared.By the end of 2024, the Standing Committee of the Bern Convention approved the European Commission’s proposal to downgrade the wolf’s protection status at the international level, a ruling that went into effect in March 2025. In May, the EU changed another law, allowing member states greater flexibility in managing their wolf populations. And on September 23, the French government relaxed the rules governing when wolves may be shot. Starting in 2026, farmers will be allowed to kill wolves attacking their livestock without prior authorization—an announcement that was met with an outcry from environmental organizations. The changes are unlikely to fix the problem, however. In human-wildlife conflicts, of which European wolves are a classic case, “most efforts have focused on finding rational solutions,” said Alexandra Zimmermann, a conservation biologist at the University of Oxford. However, she pointed out, such conflicts don’t exist on the rational level alone; they go much deeper, into “the sense of not being heard, of identities clashing.” To her, France is at a dangerous point. There is just too little land and too much bloody history here for human-wolf relationships to be easily settled.In a world dominated by the inflammatory black-and-white discourse of social media, conflicts over wolves are a perfect tool to polarize people even further for political gain: to draw them, outraged, to one side or the other.While there are many human-wildlife conflicts across the globe, those involving wolves are among the hardest to solve, Zimmermann said. They have arisen in Wisconsin, in Montana, in India—and now, more frequently and perhaps intensely than anywhere else, in Europe. Humans have a long history with wolves, full of myths, stories, misunderstandings, and violence. The fact that our best friend, the dog, descends directly from the Big Bad Wolf only fuels this love-hate relationship. And in a world dominated by the inflammatory black-and-white discourse of social media, conflicts over wolves are a perfect tool to polarize people even further for political gain: to draw them, outraged, to one side or the other.The gray wolf appeared in Europe about 400,000 years ago, then crossed to North America over the Bering Land Bridge, which linked the continents during ice ages. The species was remarkably successful. Split into over 30 subspecies, from the bulky Yukon wolf to the slender Arabian, it has colonized the Northern Hemisphere. Roughly 40,000 to 15,000 years ago, some wolves became dogs, either because humans selected the docile ones as companions or because certain wolves domesticated themselves for easy access to leftover food.Things were more or less OK on the human-wolf front as long as Homo sapiens stuck to hunting and gathering. Once our ancestors started farming, though, wolves became a problem—especially considering that livestock was often guarded by children. Add rabies into the mix, a disease that makes wolves more aggressive, and it just went downhill. Sheep got killed. Kids got killed. So we told stories of Red Riding Hood, of the Three Little Pigs, teaching children that wolves are to be feared. “A lot of narratives have been built around that, and they are perpetuated to this day,” observed Ugo Arbieu, a social ecologist at the Paris-Saclay University.In ancient Greece, prizes for killing wolves were offered as early as the sixth century BCE. In Rome, hunters called luparii scattered poisoned meatballs to rid the countryside of wolves, but the practice was likely uncommon. At the time, the wolf was often admired in Europe. The Romans believed the founders of their city were nursed by a she-wolf. Then Christianity changed everything with its idea of Jesus as the lamb of God. The wolf became a symbol of evil, a threat to the holy flock—and the hunting began in earnest.The institution of the royal wolf-catcher was created in France by Emperor Charlemagne, a devout Christian. Depending on whom you ask, it happened either in 812 or 813, which makes wolf-catchers one of the oldest branches of the French administration. The position was paid: first in grain from royal coffers, then in bounty collected from villagers for each beast killed, a practice that soon led to abuses and conflicts. The hunts were often grand affairs, with horses, packs of dogs, horns, and nets. Some wolf-catchers had at least a dozen servants, including, at one point, a baker for the hunting dogs’ bread. By the dawn of the French Revolution, the institution cost the country dearly: the equivalent of five years of a mason’s salary to kill a single wolf. And so it was abolished. Napoleon brought wolf-catchers back, but with more regulation. In 1815, for instance, the official uniform was decreed to be blue, with velvet cuffs trimmed in gold and yellow metal buttons embossed with a wolf. The position was strictly voluntary.By the 1930s, effectively no wolves were left in France, however, and very few in the rest of Europe. (In the lower 48 U.S. states, wolves were nearly decimated by the 1960s.) They were driven to extinction by habitat loss, poaching, and, yes, wolf-catchers. Yet bizarrely, the positions survived, as wolf-catchers took to chasing deer off crops instead. The only thing wolf-related was their name—and the buttons on their uniforms.Contrary to rumors circulating online, the government didn’t release the wolves, they returned on their own. Once legal protection was introduced in 1979 under the Bern Convention, and then in 1992 under the Habitats Directive, the wolves that still survived in pockets of Europe, in Italy, in Poland, in the Balkans, returned to their old territories. A single wolf can settle more than 900 miles from its birthplace. “We’ve found wolves that were born in Croatia, traveled through Slovenia and Austria before settling in Italy, in only 98 days,” Arbieu said.There are now more than 20,000 wolves across 23 EU countries. (In the contiguous United States, there are around 8,000.) In France, the official number for 2024 was 1,013, up from zero in 1991. Yet Adrian Treves, an environmental scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, doesn’t like such precise numbers. “To give the public one number is to treat the public like idiots,” he explained. “We never know the exact number of wolves. Never.”Wolf packs are fluid; individual wolves join and leave, walking long distances. Their nighttime habits and their tendency to avoid humans make counting them hard. To get some idea of the numbers, scientists use camera traps, which take photos of passing animals, track wolves via radio collars, and genetically sample wolf poop. In the winter, they use snow-track surveys, following paw prints in the snow. And in the summer, to count the litters of pups, they howl.Jérémy Lopez, the head of the pastoralism unit at Digne’s Departmental Directorate for Territorial Affairs, whose name fittingly derives from Latin for wolf, found himself in the middle of a howling survey in 2019. “It was very strange,” he told me. There were several teams trained to imitate wolves, spread out across Alpine slopes. After the sun set, the humans started howling, each person going on for about 30 seconds. Lopez joined, too. “It looked like a bunch of people hanging about trying to sound like wolves, with traffic cones for megaphones,” he laughed. Then, the wolves responded: first one pack, then another. “We ended up in the middle of two packs answering each other, and that went on for like 45 minutes,” Lopez said. It was at once silly, awesome, and humbling.While howling surveys may seem bizarre, they are commonly used to count wolf packs and their litters. Although the howls of adult wolves blend together into one voice, the pups can’t howl, and yelp instead. Such yelps can be counted, giving researchers an idea of how fast the animals are breeding.And they do breed fast, at least in Europe. The numbers of wolves across the continent, as imprecise as they may be, are up more than 50 percent over a decade. In Germany, between 2015 and 2023, the number of wolf packs increased over four times. For some, that breeds fear. What also breeds fear are media reports on wolf attacks, many of them inaccurate. A 2021 study by Arbieu and his colleagues found that articles in which the victim was allegedly bitten by a wolf tend to be more misleading—the headlines exaggerated and sensational—than those describing dog attacks.Elia Pergolizzi, a cattle farmer with large blue eyes and a large crease between them, doesn’t hide her fear of wolves. Since the attacks on her farm, which is north of Digne, started several years ago, she dreams of wolves, of hunting. “It’s fascination mixed with terror,” she said. As we talked over coffee at her wooden dining table, Pergolizzi kept getting up and walking to the wall of windows overlooking a gently sloping Alpine meadow beyond her house, dotted with rust-colored cows. Her daughter was playing out there on her own, and Pergolizzi was worried. With wolves, you just never know.Over the past decades, no humans were killed by wolves in Europe. That’s not to say it couldn’t happen. Europeans did fall victim to wolves’ jaws in the past, as evidenced by data from parish death registries. There were plenty of legends, too, such as that of La bête de Touraine, a monster of a wolf that supposedly terrorized France sometime in the late seventeenth century. It was said to have devoured more than 250 people.Folktales aside, such a fate likely wasn’t common. French historian Jean-Marc Moriceau calculated, based on public and private archive records, that wolves in France claimed only about 18 victims per year over five centuries, starting in 1575. What’s more, research suggests that rabies, which was widespread in seventeenth-century France, might have been responsible for many of the attacks—and tales of monster wolves. Yet France has been rabies-free since 2001, and the disease is now very rare across the rest of Europe, too. No rabies, no monsters.While modern Europeans are unlikely to fall victim to wolves, that’s not the case for their livestock. In 2023, wolves killed more than 10,000 farm animals in France, about a fifth of the total number of those killed across the union. That’s between two and three sheep, cows, or goats per wolf—and much more than claimed by their American cousins. (In Montana, which has an estimated wolf population of 1,096, only 31 cattle and sheep were killed in 2023.)Yet, taken alone, these numbers still don’t explain the ferocity of the European war on the wolf. For one, in absolute terms, 56,000 mauled farm animals is not that much—there are 271 million livestock in the EU. And two, farmers do get reimbursed for their losses. “Per sheep, it’s now somewhere around 260 euros,” Lopez said, “which is in general above market value.” The government also pays for indirect damages: the loss of genetic material, the stress to the rest of the flock that can result in miscarriages or lower output of milk. In 2024, wolves cost the French government about 43,000 euros per wolf in compensation to farmers and grants for livestock protection measures, such as electric fences.Julien Giraud appreciates the compensation he gets for the sheep he loses to wolves. Yet he believes that all this talk about money misses the point. “People say, ‘You’re compensated—what are you whining about?’ But until you’ve experienced it, people can’t understand,” he said. For him, it’s about the trauma of seeing your sheep gutted and bleeding all over your fields. It’s about having to finish them off to end their suffering. It’s about feeling alone with that trauma and about no one listening, really listening. It’s about governments making decisions up there in Paris and Brussels and pushing them onto farmers like him. “It’s not about the money,” he told me, shaking his head.Between 2022 and 2024, farmers’ frustration erupted into protests across Europe. In Switzerland, to decry the return of the wolf, farmers dumped dead sheep in front of a government building. In the Netherlands, they performed mock wolf hangings. In western France, pro-wolf protesters faced anti-wolf protesters. The protests weren’t just about the wolves, of course. In each country, the reasons behind the unrest were different, but there were common threads: discontent with low food prices paired with high price tags for fertilizer and feed, concerns about cheap imports of farm products from outside the EU, resentment over tightening environmental rules, and, above all, frustration with low incomes. “Farmers feel that they are stuck in liberalized markets on which they have to produce for the lowest price possible,” explained Jeroen Candel, a political scientist at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. “They have relatively little bargaining power vis-à-vis retailers and food processors.”Two triggers for the protests were the new Common Agricultural Policy, formally passed in January 2023, and the European Green Deal. In order to make the continent’s agriculture more planet-friendly, these policies required farmers to set aside more land to support biodiversity, rotate crops, and reduce pesticide use, all while adding red tape. To many farmers, it sounded like making a tough life even tougher.As Europe was due for elections to the European Parliament in June 2024, favorable policies were exchanged for electoral support, Candel said. Environmental legislation turned into “a new political cleavage both within the member states and in Brussels, where especially the conservatives and right-wing groups portray the Green Deal as a leftish, elitist project,” he said. A study of German online media revealed that the far-right populist party Alternative for Germany, or AfD, made the wolf its campaign issue. In readers’ comments, being anti-wolf was strongly linked to anti-EU sentiments and to a belief in conspiracies by “elites,” such as scientists falsifying data to encourage nature protection. In 2019, Julia Klöckner, then a minister of agriculture from the German Christian Democratic Union party, called the wolf “a campaign booster for the AfD.” The predator became a symbol of an urban hobby that threatens farmers’ livelihoods, a symbol of left versus right, of nature versus human. “Wolves are very high in symbolism,” said Fabien Quétier, the head of landscapes at Rewilding Europe, a nonprofit.The EU changed the law to make killing wolves easier apparently to placate farmers and preserve “rural livelihoods.” Some critics said that the move was not really about the farmers, but the result of a personal vendetta of Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president, whose beloved pony, Dolly, was killed in 2022 by a wolf in Beinhorn, Germany. Later, von der Leyen was quoted as saying that European wolves had “become a real danger for livestock and potentially also for humans.” Many researchers and environmental NGOs were appalled by the weakened protections, calling them a “major blow to science.” Wolves are not the enemy, they said—they bring important benefits to both nature and humanity. Take road accidents, for example. A study in Wisconsin showed that wolves make roads safer: Their presence in the state reduced collisions with deer by almost a quarter. It’s not simply that wolves eat prey so that there are fewer deer caught in literal headlights. With large predators around, the prey “start behaving differently,” Kuijper said. Deer, moose, and boars have to be on a constant lookout, which also includes paying more attention while crossing roads.Fear also forces prey to avoid spots where they may be exposed to danger, with benefits to biodiversity. “If you don’t have any predators, deer can just walk wherever they like, and they go to the places with the best food. Once you add a predator to the system, they don’t do that anymore,” Kuijper said. As a result, some parts of forests are intensely browsed by deer, while others are left to flourish. In Wisconsin, one study showed, areas inhabited by wolves are particularly rich in shrubs and wildflowers, from honeysuckles and hazelnuts to bog orchids and bluebead lilies. The differences are obvious to the naked eye: Compared to forests teeming with wolves, areas without them look as if someone had mowed down the vegetation.Yet the problem with downgrading protection of wolves, critics say, is not simply that these predators benefit ecosystems; it’s also that killing them often does little to actually protect farms (even if you wiped them all out, other predators would likely replace them). Slovakia is a case in point. A study in this central European country found no relationship between the number of wolves hunted down and the number of sheep lost by farmers. In France, the results of similar studies were mixed. On three sites, killing wolves brought the desired effects (sheep spared); on five sites, there were no effects; and on one site, the hunting actually backfired, with more livestock devoured by wolves.That is less impossible than it may seem. Wolves hunt best when they do so in large, intact packs. Kill a few individuals, and the packs break up, making the remaining wolves less efficient. “Like in a sports team, if you remove one or two members, the team will not function as it used to,” Treves said. Livestock make for easier prey than wild animals do, and so that’s what the wolves from broken packs go for.Scientists and NGOs argue that instead of simply killing wolves, we should focus on nonlethal control options, such as electric fencing, guard dogs, and shepherds. “If you don’t protect livestock, you can forget about preventing conflicts with wolves,” Kuijper said. One effective technique is fladry—a rope with flags that flutter in the wind, scaring off wolves. Electric fencing works, too, but it cuts through landscapes, preventing wildlife from moving freely. To complicate matters, wolves are fast learners. Fences can be jumped over or dug under. In one study, fladry worked for two months, and then it didn’t: The wolves figured out thxat it was just flapping cloth.Jérôme Bach, a livestock farmer north of Digne, believes that if you want to protect livestock, guard dogs are a great option. “You have to have dogs. If you don’t, the wolves will realize quickly it’s an all-you-can-eat buffet,” he said. A decade ago, Bach quit the circus where he worked as a juggler, took his beloved sidekick, a border collie, and started herding sheep. He liked the idea of being alone in nature. Now he is still in nature, but less alone. He lives with his wife and four kids on a farm in a community where everyone knows each other. He breeds guard dogs for local farmers and assists with training.On the day I visited, Bach’s barn smelled of fresh hay. Among a group of brown goats, three cream Anatolian shepherd puppies played with an empty bucket, their thick legs uncertain on a carpet of straw. They were born here, right within the herd. To be a good guardian, Bach tells me, a dog has to identify with the herd—not as a sheep or as a goat, but as their family. “Before his eyes even open, he hears the sounds of sheep, the sounds of goats, and he smells them,” Bach said. The dog gets attached to livestock, and his protective instincts, hardwired within the breed, kick in. If one day a wolf approaches the herd, the dog will feel the sheep’s distress—and he will do anything to protect them. One time, Bach heard sheep bells in the middle of the night, going off in every direction. He jumped out of bed and ran outside in his underwear. “The dogs were going wild,” he said. They barked, and they won. The wolves gave up.Yet guard dogs are not a perfect solution. The wolves often outsmart them, tricking the dogs to follow one predator while the rest of the pack attacks in a different spot. In direct combat, the dogs lose. They bother neighbors. They attack hikers. What’s more, they cost a lot of money and time. “It adds a lot of work. It’s really restrictive for us. And we already have a lot to do,” Bach said, shaking his head. Bach, like Giraud, like Pergolizzi, simply feels tired. Tired and ignored. “I’m worn out, both physically and mentally,” Pergolizzi said.For Zimmermann, these feelings—the exhaustion, the frustration, the sadness—mean that the whole discussion of the pluses and minuses of different methods of controlling wolves misses the point. It’s not about the efficacy of fladry versus fencing, or whether shooting a certain number of wolves would limit attacks. Using ideas from peace-building, Zimmermann and her colleagues identified three levels of human-wildlife conflict. The first, and the mildest, is when things are just beginning to stir, when people are still willing to talk, and practical measures such as fencing can fix the problem. That’s where human-elephant conflicts in northeast India stand. At level two, the waters become muddier: Some hurtful things were said in the past, other things were not done, and resentment is growing. At level three, the conflict becomes about identities, not animals. You know when you’ve hit level three when people start using polarized language, when they talk about threats to their way of life, about not being heard. “There is deliberate blaming of each other, hostility, completely different realities,” Zimmermann said. That’s wolves in Europe. “Wolves do seem to be an extreme case, where they’re more polarizing than any other wildlife that we’ve studied,” Treves observed.Trying to solve a level-three conflict as if it were a level-one may be self-defeating. Rational fixes come naturally to conservation scientists, Zimmermann said, but you may end up stomping on that sense of not being heard. Say an NGO turns up and tells farmers that it’s found the perfect new solar fence that is going to solve all their problems—“They will not be impressed. It’s clumsy,” she said. “The farmers might feel that they have not been heard on this, that they are always being told what to do by the scientists.” This may also explain why research shows that compensation for wolf-inflicted damages often does little to increase acceptance of these predators, and sometimes even adds fuel to the fire. “In decision-making circles, they look down on us,” Pergolizzi said. “Because for us, this is our life. It’s not just a financial matter. It’s not just, ‘Oh, I lost an animal, and it cost me this much.’ I don’t care about that—they paid me for it. It’s not about the money. It’s about physical and psychological integrity. And it goes deep. It goes very, very deep.”Pergolizzi is not your stereotypical right-wing farmer. She is anti-pesticide and worries about climate. Her house is dotted with organic products. She produces meat, but tells people to eat less of it: In her view, meat should be nature’s gift, celebrated on special occasions. In the wolf debate, she feels she is caught in between the conservative rural right and the green urban left.She didn’t believe in shooting wolves—until a few years ago, that is, when she saw one of her pregnant cows disemboweled by wolves. The cow was still alive, licking her dead calf. “I had a lot of nightmares after that,” she said. Last year, the attacks started again, even though she changed her farming practices and built a shed where the cows could calve indoors. And so she called DDT in Dinge, and a wolf-catcher came. He stayed one night, then another. He observed. It was always the same pack, and the same wolf that would initiate the attacks. So he shot that wolf, and the attacks ended. But Pergolizzi was still shaken. She felt it was a deep moral failure that she couldn’t keep her animals safe. “Psychologically, it was terrible,” she said. That’s why one day Dubois turned up at her doorstep with a psychologist. He saw that she needed to talk.Sometimes Dubois plays the therapist himself. “I’ve seen farmers—tough guys, hardened types—who’ve been holding it together for months, but when I called them, I found them in tears,” Dubois said. “There are farmers—the wolves have broken something in them. We’ve seen it happen. Sometimes the wolf-catcher goes to meet the farmer before a nighttime patrol and never leaves. He stays to talk for hours.”When Lopez interviews candidates who want to be wolf-catchers (their term is five years, but can be renewed), he tries to weed out “would-be cowboys,” he said. He is looking for people who have a sense of duty toward their community. “We don’t only ask them to go and be good shooters. We also ask them to be our eyes and ears in the field … to call the farmers, spend a couple of minutes talking with them, see how they’re doing.”Talking and listening are also at the heart of mediation—one thing that, according to Zimmermann, can actually help solve human-wildlife conflicts that have reached level three. “You really need to start bringing in people who know how to resolve conflicts, do mediation work—that’s a completely different skill set from your classic natural scientist,” she explained. Such mediators need to get to the bottom of things. Is it about cheap food imports from outside the continent? Is it about subsidies going to the wrong places? Or is it about feeling ignored? In Denmark, “The Wolf Dialogue Project,” which involved a group of people from across the political spectrum, took over two years, but ended up reducing polarization and producing several potential solutions to test, such as DNA identification of problem wolves. A similar approach, based on a method called Multicriteria Decision Analysis, showed promise in Italy.But mediation can be scary. You have to let the other side suggest solutions, even if that solution is shooting wolves. “Without even allowing that to be discussed, you are never going to get further anyway,” Zimmermann said. Simply considering shooting as an option could bring people closer—and maybe, just maybe, when people feel they’ve been heard, a compromise might emerge.Pergolizzi accepts that sometimes wolves may need to be shot, even though she doesn’t like the idea. “I’m not anti-wolf, despite everything. If I see one among my cows and I can legally kill it, I will. But I would really like us to talk about this—about the killing, about that violence—because it’s part of nature, too,” she said. She feels that, so far, there is not much real discussion about wolves in France, just two sides shouting at each other. “What exhausted me was feeling judged, unsupported, misunderstood,” she said. Everything is black and white, and so polarized. “It’s insane,” she added.But nature is not black and white—just like the wolf, it’s all about shades of gray. Yes, nature is wild, it’s beautiful, it’s free—but it’s violent, too. Nature is full of complexity, Pergolizzi said, and that complexity is what we need right now in the public discourse on wolves. “There is no easy solution,” she reflected. “We just need to understand each other.” The phone at Digne’s DDT keeps ringing.
Usually, after a night of carnage, the phone rings early in the morning. It sounds first at the Departmental Directorate for Territorial Affairs, or DDT, in an eyesore of a governmental building on the outskirts of Digne, a small town nestled between the lavender fields of Provence and the sharp peaks of the Alps. The farmer on the line is usually distraught, recounting how many sheep were mauled and how the wolves attacked. Was there just one or a whole pack? Did they jump the electric fence, fight off the guard dogs? As the farmer tells his story, a government employee issues an alert, and the administrative procedure starts rolling.Sébastien Dubois takes it from there. As a royal wolf-catcher, Dubois is the latest in a centuries-long line of guardians entrusted by the rulers of France to rid the country of troublesome wolves. They did so in the 800s under the Emperor Charlemagne, and they do so in 2025 under the local prefects. Long gone are the gold-trimmed uniforms, the silver hunting knives, the throngs of hound dogs; now it’s technical outerwear, thermal cameras, high-tech rifles with night vision scopes—and tons of paperwork.Dubois starts his missions with paperwork, too. He does a background check: Does the farmer qualify for wolf-catchers’ protection? Does he have the appropriate authorizations? If all the boxes are checked, Dubois goes to the farm, sometimes hiking for hours to remote Alpine locations. He arrives long before sunset so that he can scout the terrain. He checks the weather, the direction of the wind, and the distance to the nearest woods. He checks the wolves’ tracks and the position of the neighboring houses. Then he waits.Often he stays out all night, always within 1,000 feet of the flock (the rules again). Usually, he hunts alone. He prefers it that way. It allows him to focus on the animal, immerse himself in its mind. “I shoot wolves, yes—that’s the job,” he told me. “But I respect them. We humans, we are fools compared to them. They are always one step ahead.”Most nights, he doesn’t fire a single shot. He strikes only when the wolves are close and about to attack. One time they were preparing to charge an exhausted sheepdog that had been barking up wolves every night for a week. “The dog was drained,” Dubois remembered. “It had lain down. And I saw the wolf; it was mid-attack. I think I shot it just before it pounced.”France is at a dangerous point. There is just too little land and too much bloody history for human-wolf relationships to be easily settled.With his slight frame, in jeans and a polo shirt, Dubois doesn’t look like someone you’d describe with the words “royal” or “wolf-catcher.” Yet over the last five years he has probably spent more than 100 nights hunting wolves, killing many. (He doesn’t like to keep count, he told me.) About 20 of those nights were at a farm owned by Julien Giraud, a stout, middle-aged man with a weathered face and hands cracked from years of fieldwork. When I visited in April, the place was postcard-perfect. Snowy peaks on the horizon framed rolling fields of shortly cropped lavender. The air smelled of dry grass and sun-heated soil. Dozens of sheep grazed behind an electric fence, watched over by a giant tan dog appropriately named Simba, Swahili for lion.The scene may have been peaceful, but Giraud’s voice was tense. Everything changed on June 16, 2019, he told me. More than 100 sheep killed in three nights—a massacre. When his daughter woke up for school, there were dead bodies all around the house. She was only four at the time. “It was horrible,” Giraud said. To protect the sheep, he started sleeping in his car, which he parked near the flock. In five months, he stayed home only a couple of times. He’s not sure why his wife hasn’t left him. “These dates are burned into my memory,” he said, and started to cry.That June, Dubois came over to Giraud’s farm many times. He slept in the car near the flock, too, so that Giraud could go home, get some rest. To the farmer, Dubois is a friend, a helping hand. Yet to many others, especially those on the political left, the wolf-catcher is a symbol of all things wrong: human dominance over nature, speciesism, pointless killings. There are about 1,700 wolf-catchers in France, and some have faced threats and hate mail, Dubois said. He asked me not to use his real name because he felt it would be too risky. He wanted to protect his family.Across Europe, conflicts over wolves have intensified in recent years, and the situation in France is particularly dire. You are either pro-wolf (protect it at all costs), or anti-wolf (get rid of it), with little in between. Fake news proliferates. Wolves have been used as a scapegoat for farmers’ struggles by French politicians, and as a bargaining chip during farmers’ protests. In the United States, tensions flared after wolves were reintroduced into Yellowstone National Park and then Idaho in the mid-1990s, after a decades-long absence. But there are less than half as many wolves in the contiguous United States and far more land. It’s possible to let them roam national parks and other nature preserves, where they’ll have little interaction with humans. “The situation in Europe is much more complicated,” said Dries Kuijper, a wildlife ecologist at the Polish Academy of Sciences. There’s just not enough space for humans and wolves to avoid each other. The land has to be shared.By the end of 2024, the Standing Committee of the Bern Convention approved the European Commission’s proposal to downgrade the wolf’s protection status at the international level, a ruling that went into effect in March 2025. In May, the EU changed another law, allowing member states greater flexibility in managing their wolf populations. And on September 23, the French government relaxed the rules governing when wolves may be shot. Starting in 2026, farmers will be allowed to kill wolves attacking their livestock without prior authorization—an announcement that was met with an outcry from environmental organizations. The changes are unlikely to fix the problem, however. In human-wildlife conflicts, of which European wolves are a classic case, “most efforts have focused on finding rational solutions,” said Alexandra Zimmermann, a conservation biologist at the University of Oxford. However, she pointed out, such conflicts don’t exist on the rational level alone; they go much deeper, into “the sense of not being heard, of identities clashing.” To her, France is at a dangerous point. There is just too little land and too much bloody history here for human-wolf relationships to be easily settled.In a world dominated by the inflammatory black-and-white discourse of social media, conflicts over wolves are a perfect tool to polarize people even further for political gain: to draw them, outraged, to one side or the other.While there are many human-wildlife conflicts across the globe, those involving wolves are among the hardest to solve, Zimmermann said. They have arisen in Wisconsin, in Montana, in India—and now, more frequently and perhaps intensely than anywhere else, in Europe. Humans have a long history with wolves, full of myths, stories, misunderstandings, and violence. The fact that our best friend, the dog, descends directly from the Big Bad Wolf only fuels this love-hate relationship. And in a world dominated by the inflammatory black-and-white discourse of social media, conflicts over wolves are a perfect tool to polarize people even further for political gain: to draw them, outraged, to one side or the other.The gray wolf appeared in Europe about 400,000 years ago, then crossed to North America over the Bering Land Bridge, which linked the continents during ice ages. The species was remarkably successful. Split into over 30 subspecies, from the bulky Yukon wolf to the slender Arabian, it has colonized the Northern Hemisphere. Roughly 40,000 to 15,000 years ago, some wolves became dogs, either because humans selected the docile ones as companions or because certain wolves domesticated themselves for easy access to leftover food.Things were more or less OK on the human-wolf front as long as Homo sapiens stuck to hunting and gathering. Once our ancestors started farming, though, wolves became a problem—especially considering that livestock was often guarded by children. Add rabies into the mix, a disease that makes wolves more aggressive, and it just went downhill. Sheep got killed. Kids got killed. So we told stories of Red Riding Hood, of the Three Little Pigs, teaching children that wolves are to be feared. “A lot of narratives have been built around that, and they are perpetuated to this day,” observed Ugo Arbieu, a social ecologist at the Paris-Saclay University.In ancient Greece, prizes for killing wolves were offered as early as the sixth century BCE. In Rome, hunters called luparii scattered poisoned meatballs to rid the countryside of wolves, but the practice was likely uncommon. At the time, the wolf was often admired in Europe. The Romans believed the founders of their city were nursed by a she-wolf. Then Christianity changed everything with its idea of Jesus as the lamb of God. The wolf became a symbol of evil, a threat to the holy flock—and the hunting began in earnest.The institution of the royal wolf-catcher was created in France by Emperor Charlemagne, a devout Christian. Depending on whom you ask, it happened either in 812 or 813, which makes wolf-catchers one of the oldest branches of the French administration. The position was paid: first in grain from royal coffers, then in bounty collected from villagers for each beast killed, a practice that soon led to abuses and conflicts. The hunts were often grand affairs, with horses, packs of dogs, horns, and nets. Some wolf-catchers had at least a dozen servants, including, at one point, a baker for the hunting dogs’ bread. By the dawn of the French Revolution, the institution cost the country dearly: the equivalent of five years of a mason’s salary to kill a single wolf. And so it was abolished. Napoleon brought wolf-catchers back, but with more regulation. In 1815, for instance, the official uniform was decreed to be blue, with velvet cuffs trimmed in gold and yellow metal buttons embossed with a wolf. The position was strictly voluntary.By the 1930s, effectively no wolves were left in France, however, and very few in the rest of Europe. (In the lower 48 U.S. states, wolves were nearly decimated by the 1960s.) They were driven to extinction by habitat loss, poaching, and, yes, wolf-catchers. Yet bizarrely, the positions survived, as wolf-catchers took to chasing deer off crops instead. The only thing wolf-related was their name—and the buttons on their uniforms.Contrary to rumors circulating online, the government didn’t release the wolves, they returned on their own. Once legal protection was introduced in 1979 under the Bern Convention, and then in 1992 under the Habitats Directive, the wolves that still survived in pockets of Europe, in Italy, in Poland, in the Balkans, returned to their old territories. A single wolf can settle more than 900 miles from its birthplace. “We’ve found wolves that were born in Croatia, traveled through Slovenia and Austria before settling in Italy, in only 98 days,” Arbieu said.There are now more than 20,000 wolves across 23 EU countries. (In the contiguous United States, there are around 8,000.) In France, the official number for 2024 was 1,013, up from zero in 1991. Yet Adrian Treves, an environmental scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, doesn’t like such precise numbers. “To give the public one number is to treat the public like idiots,” he explained. “We never know the exact number of wolves. Never.”Wolf packs are fluid; individual wolves join and leave, walking long distances. Their nighttime habits and their tendency to avoid humans make counting them hard. To get some idea of the numbers, scientists use camera traps, which take photos of passing animals, track wolves via radio collars, and genetically sample wolf poop. In the winter, they use snow-track surveys, following paw prints in the snow. And in the summer, to count the litters of pups, they howl.Jérémy Lopez, the head of the pastoralism unit at Digne’s Departmental Directorate for Territorial Affairs, whose name fittingly derives from Latin for wolf, found himself in the middle of a howling survey in 2019. “It was very strange,” he told me. There were several teams trained to imitate wolves, spread out across Alpine slopes. After the sun set, the humans started howling, each person going on for about 30 seconds. Lopez joined, too. “It looked like a bunch of people hanging about trying to sound like wolves, with traffic cones for megaphones,” he laughed. Then, the wolves responded: first one pack, then another. “We ended up in the middle of two packs answering each other, and that went on for like 45 minutes,” Lopez said. It was at once silly, awesome, and humbling.While howling surveys may seem bizarre, they are commonly used to count wolf packs and their litters. Although the howls of adult wolves blend together into one voice, the pups can’t howl, and yelp instead. Such yelps can be counted, giving researchers an idea of how fast the animals are breeding.And they do breed fast, at least in Europe. The numbers of wolves across the continent, as imprecise as they may be, are up more than 50 percent over a decade. In Germany, between 2015 and 2023, the number of wolf packs increased over four times. For some, that breeds fear. What also breeds fear are media reports on wolf attacks, many of them inaccurate. A 2021 study by Arbieu and his colleagues found that articles in which the victim was allegedly bitten by a wolf tend to be more misleading—the headlines exaggerated and sensational—than those describing dog attacks.Elia Pergolizzi, a cattle farmer with large blue eyes and a large crease between them, doesn’t hide her fear of wolves. Since the attacks on her farm, which is north of Digne, started several years ago, she dreams of wolves, of hunting. “It’s fascination mixed with terror,” she said. As we talked over coffee at her wooden dining table, Pergolizzi kept getting up and walking to the wall of windows overlooking a gently sloping Alpine meadow beyond her house, dotted with rust-colored cows. Her daughter was playing out there on her own, and Pergolizzi was worried. With wolves, you just never know.Over the past decades, no humans were killed by wolves in Europe. That’s not to say it couldn’t happen. Europeans did fall victim to wolves’ jaws in the past, as evidenced by data from parish death registries. There were plenty of legends, too, such as that of La bête de Touraine, a monster of a wolf that supposedly terrorized France sometime in the late seventeenth century. It was said to have devoured more than 250 people.Folktales aside, such a fate likely wasn’t common. French historian Jean-Marc Moriceau calculated, based on public and private archive records, that wolves in France claimed only about 18 victims per year over five centuries, starting in 1575. What’s more, research suggests that rabies, which was widespread in seventeenth-century France, might have been responsible for many of the attacks—and tales of monster wolves. Yet France has been rabies-free since 2001, and the disease is now very rare across the rest of Europe, too. No rabies, no monsters.While modern Europeans are unlikely to fall victim to wolves, that’s not the case for their livestock. In 2023, wolves killed more than 10,000 farm animals in France, about a fifth of the total number of those killed across the union. That’s between two and three sheep, cows, or goats per wolf—and much more than claimed by their American cousins. (In Montana, which has an estimated wolf population of 1,096, only 31 cattle and sheep were killed in 2023.)Yet, taken alone, these numbers still don’t explain the ferocity of the European war on the wolf. For one, in absolute terms, 56,000 mauled farm animals is not that much—there are 271 million livestock in the EU. And two, farmers do get reimbursed for their losses. “Per sheep, it’s now somewhere around 260 euros,” Lopez said, “which is in general above market value.” The government also pays for indirect damages: the loss of genetic material, the stress to the rest of the flock that can result in miscarriages or lower output of milk. In 2024, wolves cost the French government about 43,000 euros per wolf in compensation to farmers and grants for livestock protection measures, such as electric fences.Julien Giraud appreciates the compensation he gets for the sheep he loses to wolves. Yet he believes that all this talk about money misses the point. “People say, ‘You’re compensated—what are you whining about?’ But until you’ve experienced it, people can’t understand,” he said. For him, it’s about the trauma of seeing your sheep gutted and bleeding all over your fields. It’s about having to finish them off to end their suffering. It’s about feeling alone with that trauma and about no one listening, really listening. It’s about governments making decisions up there in Paris and Brussels and pushing them onto farmers like him. “It’s not about the money,” he told me, shaking his head.Between 2022 and 2024, farmers’ frustration erupted into protests across Europe. In Switzerland, to decry the return of the wolf, farmers dumped dead sheep in front of a government building. In the Netherlands, they performed mock wolf hangings. In western France, pro-wolf protesters faced anti-wolf protesters. The protests weren’t just about the wolves, of course. In each country, the reasons behind the unrest were different, but there were common threads: discontent with low food prices paired with high price tags for fertilizer and feed, concerns about cheap imports of farm products from outside the EU, resentment over tightening environmental rules, and, above all, frustration with low incomes. “Farmers feel that they are stuck in liberalized markets on which they have to produce for the lowest price possible,” explained Jeroen Candel, a political scientist at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. “They have relatively little bargaining power vis-à-vis retailers and food processors.”Two triggers for the protests were the new Common Agricultural Policy, formally passed in January 2023, and the European Green Deal. In order to make the continent’s agriculture more planet-friendly, these policies required farmers to set aside more land to support biodiversity, rotate crops, and reduce pesticide use, all while adding red tape. To many farmers, it sounded like making a tough life even tougher.As Europe was due for elections to the European Parliament in June 2024, favorable policies were exchanged for electoral support, Candel said. Environmental legislation turned into “a new political cleavage both within the member states and in Brussels, where especially the conservatives and right-wing groups portray the Green Deal as a leftish, elitist project,” he said. A study of German online media revealed that the far-right populist party Alternative for Germany, or AfD, made the wolf its campaign issue. In readers’ comments, being anti-wolf was strongly linked to anti-EU sentiments and to a belief in conspiracies by “elites,” such as scientists falsifying data to encourage nature protection. In 2019, Julia Klöckner, then a minister of agriculture from the German Christian Democratic Union party, called the wolf “a campaign booster for the AfD.” The predator became a symbol of an urban hobby that threatens farmers’ livelihoods, a symbol of left versus right, of nature versus human. “Wolves are very high in symbolism,” said Fabien Quétier, the head of landscapes at Rewilding Europe, a nonprofit.The EU changed the law to make killing wolves easier apparently to placate farmers and preserve “rural livelihoods.” Some critics said that the move was not really about the farmers, but the result of a personal vendetta of Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president, whose beloved pony, Dolly, was killed in 2022 by a wolf in Beinhorn, Germany. Later, von der Leyen was quoted as saying that European wolves had “become a real danger for livestock and potentially also for humans.” Many researchers and environmental NGOs were appalled by the weakened protections, calling them a “major blow to science.” Wolves are not the enemy, they said—they bring important benefits to both nature and humanity. Take road accidents, for example. A study in Wisconsin showed that wolves make roads safer: Their presence in the state reduced collisions with deer by almost a quarter. It’s not simply that wolves eat prey so that there are fewer deer caught in literal headlights. With large predators around, the prey “start behaving differently,” Kuijper said. Deer, moose, and boars have to be on a constant lookout, which also includes paying more attention while crossing roads.Fear also forces prey to avoid spots where they may be exposed to danger, with benefits to biodiversity. “If you don’t have any predators, deer can just walk wherever they like, and they go to the places with the best food. Once you add a predator to the system, they don’t do that anymore,” Kuijper said. As a result, some parts of forests are intensely browsed by deer, while others are left to flourish. In Wisconsin, one study showed, areas inhabited by wolves are particularly rich in shrubs and wildflowers, from honeysuckles and hazelnuts to bog orchids and bluebead lilies. The differences are obvious to the naked eye: Compared to forests teeming with wolves, areas without them look as if someone had mowed down the vegetation.Yet the problem with downgrading protection of wolves, critics say, is not simply that these predators benefit ecosystems; it’s also that killing them often does little to actually protect farms (even if you wiped them all out, other predators would likely replace them). Slovakia is a case in point. A study in this central European country found no relationship between the number of wolves hunted down and the number of sheep lost by farmers. In France, the results of similar studies were mixed. On three sites, killing wolves brought the desired effects (sheep spared); on five sites, there were no effects; and on one site, the hunting actually backfired, with more livestock devoured by wolves.That is less impossible than it may seem. Wolves hunt best when they do so in large, intact packs. Kill a few individuals, and the packs break up, making the remaining wolves less efficient. “Like in a sports team, if you remove one or two members, the team will not function as it used to,” Treves said. Livestock make for easier prey than wild animals do, and so that’s what the wolves from broken packs go for.Scientists and NGOs argue that instead of simply killing wolves, we should focus on nonlethal control options, such as electric fencing, guard dogs, and shepherds. “If you don’t protect livestock, you can forget about preventing conflicts with wolves,” Kuijper said. One effective technique is fladry—a rope with flags that flutter in the wind, scaring off wolves. Electric fencing works, too, but it cuts through landscapes, preventing wildlife from moving freely. To complicate matters, wolves are fast learners. Fences can be jumped over or dug under. In one study, fladry worked for two months, and then it didn’t: The wolves figured out thxat it was just flapping cloth.Jérôme Bach, a livestock farmer north of Digne, believes that if you want to protect livestock, guard dogs are a great option. “You have to have dogs. If you don’t, the wolves will realize quickly it’s an all-you-can-eat buffet,” he said. A decade ago, Bach quit the circus where he worked as a juggler, took his beloved sidekick, a border collie, and started herding sheep. He liked the idea of being alone in nature. Now he is still in nature, but less alone. He lives with his wife and four kids on a farm in a community where everyone knows each other. He breeds guard dogs for local farmers and assists with training.On the day I visited, Bach’s barn smelled of fresh hay. Among a group of brown goats, three cream Anatolian shepherd puppies played with an empty bucket, their thick legs uncertain on a carpet of straw. They were born here, right within the herd. To be a good guardian, Bach tells me, a dog has to identify with the herd—not as a sheep or as a goat, but as their family. “Before his eyes even open, he hears the sounds of sheep, the sounds of goats, and he smells them,” Bach said. The dog gets attached to livestock, and his protective instincts, hardwired within the breed, kick in. If one day a wolf approaches the herd, the dog will feel the sheep’s distress—and he will do anything to protect them. One time, Bach heard sheep bells in the middle of the night, going off in every direction. He jumped out of bed and ran outside in his underwear. “The dogs were going wild,” he said. They barked, and they won. The wolves gave up.Yet guard dogs are not a perfect solution. The wolves often outsmart them, tricking the dogs to follow one predator while the rest of the pack attacks in a different spot. In direct combat, the dogs lose. They bother neighbors. They attack hikers. What’s more, they cost a lot of money and time. “It adds a lot of work. It’s really restrictive for us. And we already have a lot to do,” Bach said, shaking his head. Bach, like Giraud, like Pergolizzi, simply feels tired. Tired and ignored. “I’m worn out, both physically and mentally,” Pergolizzi said.For Zimmermann, these feelings—the exhaustion, the frustration, the sadness—mean that the whole discussion of the pluses and minuses of different methods of controlling wolves misses the point. It’s not about the efficacy of fladry versus fencing, or whether shooting a certain number of wolves would limit attacks. Using ideas from peace-building, Zimmermann and her colleagues identified three levels of human-wildlife conflict. The first, and the mildest, is when things are just beginning to stir, when people are still willing to talk, and practical measures such as fencing can fix the problem. That’s where human-elephant conflicts in northeast India stand. At level two, the waters become muddier: Some hurtful things were said in the past, other things were not done, and resentment is growing. At level three, the conflict becomes about identities, not animals. You know when you’ve hit level three when people start using polarized language, when they talk about threats to their way of life, about not being heard. “There is deliberate blaming of each other, hostility, completely different realities,” Zimmermann said. That’s wolves in Europe. “Wolves do seem to be an extreme case, where they’re more polarizing than any other wildlife that we’ve studied,” Treves observed.Trying to solve a level-three conflict as if it were a level-one may be self-defeating. Rational fixes come naturally to conservation scientists, Zimmermann said, but you may end up stomping on that sense of not being heard. Say an NGO turns up and tells farmers that it’s found the perfect new solar fence that is going to solve all their problems—“They will not be impressed. It’s clumsy,” she said. “The farmers might feel that they have not been heard on this, that they are always being told what to do by the scientists.” This may also explain why research shows that compensation for wolf-inflicted damages often does little to increase acceptance of these predators, and sometimes even adds fuel to the fire. “In decision-making circles, they look down on us,” Pergolizzi said. “Because for us, this is our life. It’s not just a financial matter. It’s not just, ‘Oh, I lost an animal, and it cost me this much.’ I don’t care about that—they paid me for it. It’s not about the money. It’s about physical and psychological integrity. And it goes deep. It goes very, very deep.”Pergolizzi is not your stereotypical right-wing farmer. She is anti-pesticide and worries about climate. Her house is dotted with organic products. She produces meat, but tells people to eat less of it: In her view, meat should be nature’s gift, celebrated on special occasions. In the wolf debate, she feels she is caught in between the conservative rural right and the green urban left.She didn’t believe in shooting wolves—until a few years ago, that is, when she saw one of her pregnant cows disemboweled by wolves. The cow was still alive, licking her dead calf. “I had a lot of nightmares after that,” she said. Last year, the attacks started again, even though she changed her farming practices and built a shed where the cows could calve indoors. And so she called DDT in Dinge, and a wolf-catcher came. He stayed one night, then another. He observed. It was always the same pack, and the same wolf that would initiate the attacks. So he shot that wolf, and the attacks ended. But Pergolizzi was still shaken. She felt it was a deep moral failure that she couldn’t keep her animals safe. “Psychologically, it was terrible,” she said. That’s why one day Dubois turned up at her doorstep with a psychologist. He saw that she needed to talk.Sometimes Dubois plays the therapist himself. “I’ve seen farmers—tough guys, hardened types—who’ve been holding it together for months, but when I called them, I found them in tears,” Dubois said. “There are farmers—the wolves have broken something in them. We’ve seen it happen. Sometimes the wolf-catcher goes to meet the farmer before a nighttime patrol and never leaves. He stays to talk for hours.”When Lopez interviews candidates who want to be wolf-catchers (their term is five years, but can be renewed), he tries to weed out “would-be cowboys,” he said. He is looking for people who have a sense of duty toward their community. “We don’t only ask them to go and be good shooters. We also ask them to be our eyes and ears in the field … to call the farmers, spend a couple of minutes talking with them, see how they’re doing.”Talking and listening are also at the heart of mediation—one thing that, according to Zimmermann, can actually help solve human-wildlife conflicts that have reached level three. “You really need to start bringing in people who know how to resolve conflicts, do mediation work—that’s a completely different skill set from your classic natural scientist,” she explained. Such mediators need to get to the bottom of things. Is it about cheap food imports from outside the continent? Is it about subsidies going to the wrong places? Or is it about feeling ignored? In Denmark, “The Wolf Dialogue Project,” which involved a group of people from across the political spectrum, took over two years, but ended up reducing polarization and producing several potential solutions to test, such as DNA identification of problem wolves. A similar approach, based on a method called Multicriteria Decision Analysis, showed promise in Italy.But mediation can be scary. You have to let the other side suggest solutions, even if that solution is shooting wolves. “Without even allowing that to be discussed, you are never going to get further anyway,” Zimmermann said. Simply considering shooting as an option could bring people closer—and maybe, just maybe, when people feel they’ve been heard, a compromise might emerge.Pergolizzi accepts that sometimes wolves may need to be shot, even though she doesn’t like the idea. “I’m not anti-wolf, despite everything. If I see one among my cows and I can legally kill it, I will. But I would really like us to talk about this—about the killing, about that violence—because it’s part of nature, too,” she said. She feels that, so far, there is not much real discussion about wolves in France, just two sides shouting at each other. “What exhausted me was feeling judged, unsupported, misunderstood,” she said. Everything is black and white, and so polarized. “It’s insane,” she added.But nature is not black and white—just like the wolf, it’s all about shades of gray. Yes, nature is wild, it’s beautiful, it’s free—but it’s violent, too. Nature is full of complexity, Pergolizzi said, and that complexity is what we need right now in the public discourse on wolves. “There is no easy solution,” she reflected. “We just need to understand each other.” The phone at Digne’s DDT keeps ringing.
