The Christian Social Democrats believe that there is no place for wolves in Germany, and members of the party have called for their intentional extinction. Taking around 10% of the vote they are a small but relatively influential party – and given the way that elections work in Germany, coalitions are common. Unfortunately, coalitions will often give small parties an outsized voice, so this foolish position has the potential to become government policy faster than one would expect.
Its sister party, with about 25% of the populations support has called for a dramatic increase in the hunting of wolves.
While some places are calling for a quota to be killed each year, as happens in Sweden and Finland, reactive culling may be better.
It is not easy for locals to get the evidence together to prove a specific wolf needs culling – one male was killed last year, after he was found to have killed 76 farm animals.
I certainly agree that some wolves are going to need culling when they live close to humans. We have a lot of habits that make us easy targets, and while attacks on humans are incredibly rare, we need to make sure that livestock does not become a wolves larder. At the same time, this is incredibly rare, as I have written about before, in Romania with far more wolves, livestock losses are relatively rare.
Wolves will generally prefer wild prey living alongside farm animals.
Wolves are capable of generating large amounts of tourism money (thought to be around 10 times the amount made by hunting them), and simple taxes on this money could amply pay for their damages.
