When Is It Right to Kill a Wolf?
Across Europe, conflicts over wolves have intensified in recent years, and the situation in France is particularly dire. You are either pro-wolf (protect it at all costs), or anti-wolf (get rid of it), with little in between. Fake news proliferates. Wolves have been used as a scapegoat for farmers’ struggles by French politicians, and as a bargaining chip during farmers’ protests. In the United States, tensions flared after wolves were reintroduced into Yellowstone National Park and then Idaho in the mid-1990s, after a decades-long absence. But there are less than half as many wolves in the contiguous United States and far more land. It’s possible to let them roam national parks and other nature preserves, where they’ll have little interaction with humans. “The situation in Europe is much more complicated,” said Dries Kuijper, a wildlife ecologist at the Polish Academy of Sciences. There’s just not enough space for humans and wolves to avoid each other. The land has to be shared.
By the end of 2024, the Standing Committee of the Bern Convention approved the European Commission’s proposal to downgrade the wolf’s protection status at the international level, a ruling that went into effect in March 2025. In May, the EU changed another law, allowing member states greater flexibility in managing their wolf populations. And on September 23, the French government relaxed the rules governing when wolves may be shot. Starting in 2026, farmers will be allowed to kill wolves attacking their livestock without prior authorization—an announcement that was met with an outcry from environmental organizations. The changes are unlikely to fix the problem, however. In human-wildlife conflicts, of which European wolves are a classic case, “most efforts have focused on finding rational solutions,” said Alexandra Zimmermann, a conservation biologist at the University of Oxford. However, she pointed out, such conflicts don’t exist on the rational level alone; they go much deeper, into “the sense of not being heard, of identities clashing.” To her, France is at a dangerous point. There is just too little land and too much bloody history here for human-wolf relationships to be easily settled.
While there are many human-wildlife conflicts across the globe, those involving wolves are among the hardest to solve, Zimmermann said. They have arisen in Wisconsin, in Montana, in India—and now, more frequently and perhaps intensely than anywhere else, in Europe. Humans have a long history with wolves, full of myths, stories, misunderstandings, and violence. The fact that our best friend, the dog, descends directly from the Big Bad Wolf only fuels this love-hate relationship. And in a world dominated by the inflammatory black-and-white discourse of social media, conflicts over wolves are a perfect tool to polarize people even further for political gain: to draw them, outraged, to one side or the other.
