Wolves, for and against

Pass­ing through

Whether we will have wolves in Cat­alo­nia in the fu­ture re­mains un­known. “We can’t know for sure, nor can we know how they would be­have within the ter­ri­tory. Wolves have ar­rived and passed through Cat­alo­nia and left for Aragon,” ex­plains Ig­nasi Castellví, nat­u­ral­ist and mem­ber of the en­tity Sig­na­tus. This means that here they have not found the basic nec­es­sary con­di­tions: other wolves, water, forests, space to move, nat­ural prey and tran­quil­lity. “A sex­u­ally ma­ture young two-year-old male who has aban­doned the wolf­pack may ar­rive in a ter­ri­tory like Cat­alo­nia, but since there is no sig­nif­i­cant den­sity of wolves it prob­a­bly doesn’t end up stay­ing here,” ob­serves Castellví, who is per­son­ally in favour of rein­tro­duc­ing the species. Wolves are con­sid­ered ex­tinct in Cat­alo­nia be­cause they do not re­pro­duce, al­though as a species they are in­cluded in the cat­a­logue of en­dan­gered na­tive wildlife. Due to this cat­a­logu­ing, if wolves were to ar­rive, then pro­tec­tion and con­ser­va­tion mea­sures would have to be taken.

Al­though the pos­si­bil­ity of re­pro­duc­tion is un­cer­tain, en­vi­ron­men­tal­ists have not lost hope. The most en­cour­ag­ing fact is that a pair of wolves, male and fe­male, has been de­tected in the town of Alcañiz, in Lower Aragón, a short dis­tance (about 80 kilo­me­tres) from the Els Ports mas­sif. It is there­fore pos­si­ble to imag­ine wolves spread­ing from the west and not from the Pyre­nees, as every­one ex­pected to hap­pen when their pres­ence be­came of­fi­cial in 2004.

The fe­male from Alcañiz was first iden­ti­fied in 2020, when the con­di­tions of the Covid pan­demic favoured the dis­per­sal of these an­i­mals. Since then, she has had the com­pany of two males: one was run over and killed, and the other, of Ital­ian lin­eage, she is ex­pected to be able to breed with “be­cause that is what his bi­ol­ogy tells us,” says Castellví. If the pair do end up breed­ing, that would be im­por­tant for ge­netic vari­abil­ity, given that they are an Iber­ian wolf and an Ital­ian wolf. In Eu­rope, the pop­u­la­tions of Iber­ian, Ital­ian and cen­tral Eu­ro­pean wolves re­main quite iso­lated from each other and the fact that they end up con­nect­ing helps to avoid in­breed­ing.

Eu­ro­pean reg­u­la­tion

At the Eu­ro­pean level, wolves are pro­tected by a 1992 di­rec­tive. But since the end of last year, fol­low­ing pres­sure from farm­ers, the pos­si­bil­ity of re­duc­ing this pro­tec­tion has been con­sid­ered. “We’re afraid that the wolf will lose its sta­tus due to the po­lit­i­cal in­ter­est of the pres­i­dent of the Eu­ro­pean Com­mis­sion, Ur­sula von der Leyen, who, be­cause there are elec­tions, is look­ing to pre­vent the far right from ris­ing,” says Castellví. “The PSOE gov­ern­ment seems to be in favour of main­tain­ing pro­tec­tion, but if a right-wing party comes to gov­ern in Spain, and if Eu­ro­pean laws favour per­se­cu­tion, we will again have a sce­nario in which the wolf can be hunted,” he warns.

Farm­ers against rein­tro­duc­tion

“Wolves are a prob­lem for farm­ers. All those who com­ment about wolves who live in cities should come and see the dam­age they’re doing in other parts of the Penin­sula, where some farm­ers have even had to quit be­cause of them,” claims Joan Gui­tart, ter­ri­to­r­ial co­or­di­na­tor of the Farm­ers’ Union in the Upper Pyre­nees.

In the past, he re­calls, shep­herds ac­com­pa­nied their flocks with a shot­gun. They lived and even slept with them. “Farm­ers can still do this, of course, but at the price of that being your life. You can save the herd, but you won’t have a fam­ily life. I chal­lenge wolf ad­vo­cates to buy a flock of sheep and put them­selves in an area with wolves, see how long they last,” Gui­tart says. The most ef­fec­tive sys­tems to make the pres­ence of wolves com­pat­i­ble with live­stock farm­ing are fences and elec­tric meshes, as well as guard dogs.