Howls Erupt Over Return of Wolves to France
11/1/99
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Title: Howls over wolves' return
Source: The Christian Science Monitor
Status: Copyright 1999, contact source for permission to reprint
Date: November 1, 1999
Byline: Peter Ford
ABRIES, FRANCE - High on the sunlit uplands of the French Alps, amid
juniper bushes and marmot burrows, a scattered flock of sheep graze
peacefully on the last of the summer pasture under their shepherd's
watchful eye.
Little do they know that lurking nearby is a pack of wolves. Nor that
those wolves have propelled them into the center of an impassioned
debate about whether man can ever live with his age-old enemy, canis
lupus, in this wild and spectacular corner of Europe.
Philosophical reflection about man's place in nature is not foremost
among Frederic Bues's priorities, though. A local sheep breeder, he
lost 57 of his ewes last year to wolves, he says. As far as he is
concerned, "sheep breeding and wolves are incompatible. The only
solution is to eradicate the wolves."
That would be illegal, though, under wildlife protection laws. All
the more so since many of the wolves - and many of the sheep - live
in natural parks. "If you want the beauty of the park, you have to
take the beast with it," says Jean-Yves Astruc, director of the
Queyras Regional Park.
Which leaves the shepherds with a challenge. "The wolf has arrived,
and we have to try to see if we can make do," says Olivier Bel,
president of the local shepherds' association. "We just want to
reduce the number of casualties as far as possible, and go on working
at a job we love."
Wolves had been extinct in France for more than half a century until
1992, when a pair was sighted in the southern Alps. Apparently the
two had crossed the border from Italy, where hundreds of European
wolves roam down in the distant Abruzzi mountains.
Just as in the United States, where deliberate wolf reintroduction
programs have sparked controversy, "park rangers were delighted to
see the wolf arrive; sheep breeders saw it as a catastrophe," recalls
Pierre Braque, author of a government report on the wolf's return.
Today, some 50 wolves are believed to prowl the French Alps, and the
shepherds' fears have been realized: Wolves are blamed for more than
1,000 sheep deaths last year, mauling them or panicking them into
cliff-edge stampedes. This year's figures are expected to be worse.
Few of the sheep that make the Alps an open-air larder for a wolf
live in the region year round. Most of them come up from the lowlands
of the south of France in the spring, in a centuries-old migratory
tradition known as la transhumance, to spend five months on mountain
pastures.
With lamb prices low and conditions difficult, French sheep breeders
survive only thanks to European Union subsidies. Even with that aid,
life is touch-and-go for those with smaller flocks of a few hundred
animals. Their patience is running thin.
"We've got enough difficulties as it is," complains Mr. Bues, who
took over his father's flock four years ago. "These wolves are the
last straw. If I'd known they were around, I wouldn't have gone into
this business."
Something has to be done, insists Mr. Braque, a senior Agriculture
Ministry official, "or we'll end up with the Italian situation, where
the wolves are officially protected, but they get shot anyway."
Already, some farmers are taking matters into their own hands. The
skinned body of a wolf was left at the entrance to the Mercantour
National Park in the southern Alps this summer, and rumors abound of
shepherds leaving poisoned sheep carcasses on mountainsides where
wolves are known to hunt.
"For us there is only one solution," says Serge Jousselme, an
official with the local young farmers' association. "It is to put the
wolves in a park. We can talk about its size, but they have to be
shut in and managed."
For naturalists, that is unthinkable.
"To put a wolf in an enclosed space makes the species meaningless,"
argues Michel Blanchet, chief scientist at the Queyras park. "You
wouldn't be keeping wolves, you'd be keeping just a memory of
wolves."
One thing is clear: The only way to protect the wolves is to protect
the sheep, and a growing number of breeders are beginning to use
grants from the EU - which is keen to promote wildlife diversity - to
keep the wolves at bay.
Some solutions
Top of the list when it comes to protective measures is the pastou,
the Great Pyrenean mountain dog, a shambling and gentle-looking
bundle of white fur that will nonetheless stand up to a wolf or any
other predator (see story below).
The EU's "Life" program has also funded the purchase of hundreds of
rolls of elecctrified wire fencing, so tha flocks can be corralled at
night, rather than just sleeping wild on the mountainside, as they
used to do. New cabins are being built in the more remote pastures,
enabling shepherds to sleep closer to their sheep at night, and old
ones - spartan to say the least - are being made more comfortable.
Money has been spent on ways to make a shepherd's life easier, such
as two-way radios for keeping in touch with families, and on
increased salaries for young shepherds to do the extra work that the
threat of wolves demands.
Shepherds are also coming up with their own ideas. Several are using
bird scarers - gas-powered machines that make a loud bang every few
minutes - to frighten off wolves at night. One rigs up a set of
speakers around his corral and hooks them up to a tape recorder that
plays intermittently through the night.
This does not add up to the peaceful idyll of sheepherding myth. When
wolves are around, a shepherd gets no rest, putting in 100 hours a
week on alert guarding as many as 2,500 animals. "That puts
impossible pressure on you," says shepherd Didier Castelle.
Still, the combination of protective dogs, and mobile corrals, and
more regular human presence seems to pay off. Among the 20 flocks who
summered this year in the Queyras park, "There wasn't a single attack
on a flock inside the wire, with a dog and a shepherd nearby," exults
park director Astruc.
Shepherds themselves are less convinced. Roger Minard's flock
suffered six wolf attacks last year, but hasn't had any while using
dogs, corrals, and a sound machine. Still, Mr. Minard says there is
no such thing as 100-percent protection. "It depends on the mountain,
it depends on the weather, it depends on the shepherd," he says. "And
one day, the wolves are going to get used to my noisemaker." Then, he
worries, "we will have to choose between an ecology of the wolf,
which leaves no room for us, or an ecology of transhumance."
Other shepherds are more optimistic and believe that the bigger
problem is to persuade the government and the EU to come up with
enough money for the protective measures that are needed. "One good
thing," Mr. Castelle says with a grin as he leans on his shepherd's
stick, "is that the wolf has arrived with his pockets stuffed with
euro cash."
'Society must help pay'
"The wolf costs a lot," acknowledges Mr. Bel, the shepherds'
association president. "And it must not be just the shepherd and the
sheep breeder who pay the price. If society wants wolves, then
society will have to pay for them."
In Queyras park, Astruc has ambitious, if expensive, plans to
maintain at least a sporadic human presence during the winter in
areas likely to be colonized by wolves in an attempt to keep them
away from pastures. He has hired two wardens to tramp the
mountainsides on showshoes and skis, is sending forestry workers out
on patrol, and is even trying to persuade the French Army to use the
Queyras for airborne winter combat exercises.
It all seems rather complicated for an attempt to keep things
natural. But as angry farmers start reaching for their guns, "the
fact is that the wolves are here," says Castelle. "It would be more
enriching for all of us to find subtle solutions, instead of simply
killing them."