Wolves in Germany: Do wolves still deserve protection?

The wind carries the smell of fresh hay to the edge of the road.

There Gabriela Depenau is leaning against the post of a high fence, a few meters away a horse is nibbling on lush grass, not far from the other members of his herd, 40 animals belong to it.

But the idyll is deceptive.

Since GW950m and GW1423f made the Burgdorfer Holz their territory, the quiet country life in Hanover's horse region is over.

When Gabriela Depenau and her husband set up their horse farm in Dedenhausen, 34 kilometers east of Hanover, thirty years ago, there were no wolves here - not since 1872 a body hunter of King George V of Hanover killed the last wolf on the territory of what is now Lower Saxony. For about twenty years, however, the Isegrim has been stalking large parts of Germany from the Saxon part of Lusatia. "Between 20 and 25 individuals live in Burgdorfer Holz, so it is probably the largest pack in Germany," says Depenau. Since then it has been important to protect the 150 horses from our own breeding as well as those of the horse boarding house. A struggle for survival - on both sides. The farmer not only installed fences and cameras to protect her animals,but also advocates a change in the management of the previously strictly protected predator.

According to the last wolf monitoring by the federal government, there were 128 packs as well as 39 pairs and nine individual animals in Germany in May 2020. Around 84 percent of wolves live in Brandenburg, Saxony and Lower Saxony. "We already have very high wolf densities in Germany, even higher than in Yellowstone National Park," says Klaus Hackländer, Chairman of the German Wildlife Foundation and Professor of Wildlife Biology and Hunting Management at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences in Vienna. According to a study by the Federal Agency for Nature Conservation, Germany still offers a lot of space for the wolf. The country has around 700 to 1400 territories, which would provide space for around 10,000 wolves - ten times as many as today. And that could be achieved quickly, because the population is growing by around 35 percent every year.

So also the wolf pack on the doorstep of the Depenaus. "Last year they had eight, this year they should have seven puppies," she says. And so living together in Burgdorfer Holz is becoming more and more difficult, because the robbers are hungry. According to the analyzes of more than 8000 fecal samples by the Senckenberg Museum für Naturkunde in Görlitz, German wolves mostly feed on wild animals: roe deer, wild boar and red deer. Sheep, goats, cattle or horses do not play a major role with 1.6 percent.

And yet: with the number of wolves, so does the number of cunning farm animals (see graphic). “Last year three horses were torn within a radius of five kilometers. First a Shetland pony, then a larger pony and then a Tinker mare in September, ”says Depenau. The latter was a handsome carriage horse. If an animal is ripped off, the owner receives up to 5000 euros in compensation from the state - not much for a pedigree horse, "besides, they are family members". For the wolf, finely fenced food is easier to capture than a nimble deer. "Wolves are just opportunists," says Klaus Hackländer. They eat what is easiest to get.