EYGALAYES — Wield a gun? Nelly Rigeade would never have believed she was capable of it. She has always hated firearms.
But in February 2023, she took a training course to get a hunting license. She wanted to stop feeling helpless in the face of constant wolf attacks on her sheep and goat farm, located in the Drôme department in southeastern France. Farmers are authorized to shoot the predator, but only if it’s attacking their livestock. A few weeks before the training, her partner, Sylvain Rigeade, who manages the farm with her, summarized the situation: “Either she quits or she hangs herself.”
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For the Rigeades, 2023 was synonymous with slaughter. Of their 250 ewes, 29 were killed but only eight deaths were officially attributed to wolves. The predator scares the herds, causing animals to flee, with some potentially falling from the top of a cliff. Without an identified bite, however, the true cause of death may not be attributed to a wolf. But Sylvain Rigeade has no doubt.
“For six consecutive months, we were a daily focal point of attacks, with up to six attempts in just one night,” he says. Nelly had “the fright of her life” when she found herself face-to-face with a wolf showing its fangs, the neighbors’ little Yorkshire Terrier was devoured one night, and the couple is fighting an exhausting battle to constantly repel the predator.
The battle’s cost is “equivalent to the value of the herd” and mobilizes 12 dogs, Sylvain Rigeade says, noting with bitter irony “protection works very well, but only when there are no wolves around.” Now haunted by this anxiety, the couple never even goes away for the weekend because they “can’t leave the herd to someone who is not trained in combat.”
While such a situation was unthinkable a few decades ago, it is becoming increasingly common for farmers in France.
A very political issue
Eradicated from the country around 1930, wolves started returning in the early 1990s, arriving from Italy. The species has spread, so much so that it has recently been spotted in the Brittany region, in northwest France.
The number of individuals has almost doubled in the past five years to reach 1,104, according to the French Office for Biodiversity (OFB). Wolf attacks have officially caused the death of just over 12,000 farm animals each year. While that figure has been relatively stable in recent years, it has been enough to arouse the farmers’ frustration and, more recently, to cause a clear political jolt.
Brussels’s wolf initiative was part of a series of U-turns aimed at winning back the rural electorate.
The French government’s new “wolf plan” is proof of that. Presented in February, it eases the conditions for killing the predator, sparking anger among its defenders. Brussels has also initiated a discussion to potentially tweak the species’ status, which today remains “strictly protected” in the European Union.
For pro-wolf advocates, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen launched this initiative under emotional stress: her own pony died under the fangs of the predator. Yet this probably underestimate von der Leyen.
Aware that the animal has become a political topic, von der Leyen’s wolf initiative was part of a series of reversals on draft European rules (animal welfare, pesticide use). These changes all had one goal: winning back the hearts of the rural electorate. Yet a few months later, anger engulfed the farming community across the EU.
Rural-urban standoff
Behind the issue of cohabitating with wolves lie fractures tearing contemporary European societies apart. A standoff is forming between two words that ignore each other geographically and sociologically and accuse each other of bad faith.
The first example of these divergent views is disagreement over how counting the wolf population. OFB experts, although extremely precise, are accused of underestimating the number of individuals (they count about a thousand of them).
“It’s a bogus figure!” says Sylvain Rigeade, pointing to inconsistencies between the number of wolves that were likely killed — taking into account widespread poaching — and the fact that the population is still growing. “If there were only a thousand animals, their number could no longer increase under these conditions,” he says.
Another question tearing the two sides apart is whether France allowing itself to become overwhelmed by a phenomenon that its neighbors are managing better.
No, says Bruno Lecomte, a goat breeder in the Vosges department, who has become the bane of pro-wolf advocates. With his camera, he has become a reporter, posting the results of his investigations on YouTube. His conclusion is that wolves are causing trouble everywhere, but no one dares to say anything.
A wolf attack can lead to disorders “comparable to post-traumatic stress,” depression and suicidal thoughts.
In Germany, for example, “the problem is exactly the same, and Germans believe that things are going well in France!” Lecomte says. He gives multiple anecdotes and testimonies from Italy and Spain that tend to demonstrate that wolves are no less hungry or reckless outside of France. But that their impact is minimized everywhere.
Anne Sander, a French MEP from the right-wing Les Républicains party, echoes the farmer: “Don’t let anyone tell us that other countries are doing better: I have colleagues who are taking action on this issue in Austria, Italy, Slovenia and Germany!” Sander witnesses “very strong frustration” on this topic from “people who don’t understand why the well-being of wild animals would prevail over that of their livestock or even that of farmers themselves.”
The health of farmers has also been affected. Questioned on the subject, an occupational physician said that a wolf attack can lead to disorders “comparable to post-traumatic stress” He cites cases of depression and suicidal thoughts, as well as that of a 14-year-old boy who ended up at the hospital after seeing his animals devoured.
“Being attacked without being able to defend yourself is very difficult,” he says, rejecting the argument that farmers could profit financially from predation via the compensation granted by the French government: “Saying that means you understand nothing about the bond between them and their animals.”
A dream of biodiversity
Cédric Vial, a Les Républicains senator in the Savoie department, in eastern France, observes that “The wolf is among the very first subjects that people in mountain communities want to discuss with me, while that is much less the case in the lowlands. For many farmers, a solution to this problem will only be found when wolves arrive in the Paris region. Only then will Parisians start to care.”
Vial is rather blunt when he describes this “real divide” between rural and urban residents, accusing the latter of underestimating the problem “as long as they can buy their Beaufort cheese.” He concludes, sharply: “Personally, the shark population at Réunion doesn’t bother me.” This echoes what an angry internet user commented on a video on the topic: “City dwellers can’t stand pigeons, but they want us to live with wolves.”
Claude Font, general secretary of the National Sheep Federation, says that there are “two worlds that can’t agree with each other”: one, made up of “those who have to live alongside predators”; and the other composed of “those who dream of wolves and biodiversity while they go back home comfortably in the evening.” Yet the latter sometimes do much more than “dream of biodiversity.”
For example, the former research director at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CRNS), Pierre Jouventin, went so far as to live with a she-wolf he had taken in at birth in the 1980s — before it was banned. Author of the book Wolf, This Unloved Animal Who Resembles Us (“Le loup, ce mal-aimé qui nous ressemble”), Jouventin knows better than anyone this animal that is “completely different from the dog — which is why we invented the dog.”
An ecosystem cornerstone
Part of Jouventin’s family life, his wolf Kamala proved to be protective and extremely affectionate. “We were members of her pack, and she would licked my son’s face when he felt sad after getting a bad grade,” he remembers.
But the animal also demonstrated a wild temperament and a strength that made cohabitation complicated. “I don’t recommend it to anyone,” Jouventin says, noting that Kamala, “when trying to get out of a room, was able to knock down a door or scratch a wall to the point of loosening the bricks.”
For this scientist, it is clear that the wolf issue “has ignored science and ecological implications to become political, in the electoral sense of the term.” He denounces a trend growth in the quotas of wolves that can be killed and says he is surprised to find that, of the 12,000 animals attacked in 2022, “most are not attributed with absolute certainty to wolves, as stray dogs are no longer being taken into account.”
Jouventin notes that the wolf population, in relation to that of humans, is minuscule compared to what it was historically. And he finds that lethal shootings of wolves have coincided with an increase in attacks on livestock. This brings some credence to the idea — put forward by some but contested among farmers —that killing individuals can scatter the remaining members of the pack and cause more erratic and potentially more deadly predation behavior.
The wolf’s return to Yellowstone National Park in 1995 deeply regenerated the ecosystems there.
Thomas Pfeiffer, history and geography profession, who is well versed in the history of wolves and its representations in human cultures, highlights the heart of the debate: as a “super predator at the top of the trophic chain,” wolves “make ecosystems healthier and restore a little balance in the imbalance.”
The example of Yellowstone National Park in the U.S. is often cited: the predator’s return in 1995 deeply regenerated the ecosystems there. “Unlike hunters, wolves target weaker animals,” Pfeiffer says.
Jean-Louis Martin, CNRS emeritus research director, agrees: by preventing the proliferation of hoofed mammals, wolves limit the impact of these herbivores on vegetation. “Bringing predators back enables the renewal of the forest, with cascading effects on the insects which depend on undergrowth and therefore, in turn, on the birds feeding on these insects,” he says.
And there are more benefits: the return of vegetation contributes to the soil’s regeneration, which can thus store more carbon. The wolf is “like the cornerstone” of the whole system.
A dangerous predator
It was the progressive awareness of the way these ecosystems work that pushed Europeans, in 1992, to ensure the protection of wolves as part of the Habitats Directive.
But, for historian Jean-Marc Moriceau, this decision reflects a pendulum swing in the opposition direction regarding a beast which had always been feared. It reflected a reversal of values evident in children’s literature; the big bad wolf has been replaced by a much more likable character.
“After the trauma of World War II, men wanted to readjust their position in relation to nature,” says Moriceau, the author of numerous books on wolves, including History of the Big Bad Wolf (“Histoire du méchant loup”). But at that time, “the image of the wolf came from outside of our borders, in particular from Canada’s Far North, with figures like White Fang, gradually transforming the animal into an emblem of the wilderness.”
The 1980s completed this shift and made the animal a noble species. A perception “accepted even more so as it was spread by educated elites, who were convinced that the predator’s dangerousness had been exaggerated,” Moriceau says. In his latest book, The Memory of People of the Land (“La Mémoire des gens de la terre”), he concludes that the wolf has created “a very important fracture” in our collective memory over the centuries.
With few exceptions, it is the countryside that has suffered the majority of wolf attacks. The total number turned out to be higher than Moriceau himself would have believed.
“At the start of my research, I thought wolf attacks were a minor phenomenon that had given rise to a dark legend… But I was wrong,” he says, adding he has become a “man to be silenced” in a world where a form of “omerta” prevails.
A territorial approach?
“Ever since Antiquity, wolves have attacked men in very specific situations, taking advantage of wars, the weakness or the isolation of individuals,” Moriceau says. Often, these were children taking care of grazing flocks. Over the periods of time Moriceau studied, he estimates “an average of 40 deaths per year in a normal year” and that this figure reached “hundreds at the time French author Charles Perrault wrote his tales,” which include “Little Red Riding Hood”.
At the end of the 19th century, the rewards for killing a wolf beast were multiplied by seven, triggering a process of extermination which stopped around 1930.
Wolves are “above all opportunistic and capable of adapting their attitude to the power balance.”
The pro-wolf camp responds that the animal is afraid of attacking a biped. The vast majority of attacks on humans would therefore have been caused by rabid wolves or individuals crossed with dogs. But Moriceau argues the opposite. He believes that wolves are “above all opportunistic and capable of adapting their attitude depending on the power balance.” Even if that means attacking, sometimes, a two-footed animal.
Moriceau calls for taking “a territorial approach to the wolf issue” and ending “a single dogma for the whole of Europe.” In other words, to authorize its hunting in pastoral areas, where it is “either man or wolf,” in order to better put to use its role as super-regulator elsewhere.
This would allow us to draw inspiration from the Inuit proverb which says that “the caribou feeds the wolf, but it is the wolf that keeps the caribou strong” — all while avoiding, according to the French expression, “letting the wolf into the sheep pen.”
