Why Have European Wolves Recovered So Much in the Past Decade?
The predators have increased by almost 60 percent on the continent
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Wolves have filled humans with wonder throughout our history, and they have been featured in art and mythology for thousands of years. Today, hikers who witness the carnivores on the trail may be struck with a sense of fear or even awe before they reach for their smartphone. But farmers trying to protect their sheep might have a different reaction to a wolf than a city dweller trying to photograph the predator for a post on Instagram.
More and more people in Europe might find themselves in these situations. By 2022, wolf populations in Europe had increased by almost 60 percent over the previous decade, according to a February study in PLOS Sustainability and Transformation. Although large carnivore populations are declining worldwide, European gray wolves (a subspecies of Canis lupus) defy the trend. The increase is especially impressive since in Europe wolves must share a largely human-dominated landscape.
The findings show that wolves adapt remarkably well to living with humans in urban and agricultural areas, making an impressive comeback since going nearly extinct in Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Sharing the land with wolves means some farmers lose livestock when wolves eat them, and some farmers retaliate by killing wolves, not always legally. But regulations throughout Europe to protect wolves and compensation for farmers who lose livestock have supported coexistence among humans and wolves, according to the paper.
Wolves are extremely adaptable, according to Luigi Boitani, co-author of the new study and chair of a European large carnivore specialist group at the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Species Survival Commission. “Wolves can survive on anything that is edible,” says Boitani. Wolves are generalist carnivores, so they eat deer, pigs, sheep or whatever mammals are available. Boitani adds that in the 1950s and 1960s, wolves in Italy survived by scavenging garbage. Instead of asking why European wolves are doing so well, he says, “the question we should ask is, ‘Why not?’”
The European Union’s current human population is roughly 450 million people, meaning wolf ranges may have an average density of 95 human inhabitants per square mile. Wolves primarily live in mountainous and rural farming areas, but they can survive near cities. The high degree of human presence raises the question of whether Europe has found a special recipe to coexist with large predatory mammals.
For wolves to recover in human-dominated landscapes, humans need to accept a certain level of impact on their lives and some potential for conflict, says Boitani—that might be the key to European wolves’ success. “You have to be willing to coexist,” he says.
“The European wolf recovery has been really incredible to watch,” says Grant Spickelmier, executive director of the International Wolf Center, who was not involved in the new study. “Wolves are resilient, and they’re opportunistic. … As long as they are given enough prey and habitat and tolerance from the local human population, they can survive.” Conservation efforts have boosted prey populations, like deer and wild boar, which supported European wolf recovery.
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In the new study, the researchers compiled data on wolf populations in 34 countries across Europe and analyzed conservation policies from around 2012 to 2022. In 2022, at least 21,500 wolves lived in Europe, and 19,000 within the E.U., which is a 58 percent increase from an estimated 12,000 wolves ten years earlier. Wolf populations improved in most countries, and wolves are now found in all but the smallest countries in mainland Europe—like Monaco, San Marino and the Vatican.
Overall, wolf numbers increased in 19 countries, remained stable in eight, fluctuated in three and declined in three. Some countries had drastic boosts in wolf populations: In Germany, one pack of wolves in 2000 grew to 184 packs in a monitoring period that ended in 2023. The reunification of East and West Germany in 1990 kicked off this recovery: While in East Germany it had been legal to hunt wolves, they were protected in the West, so united Germany applied these protections to the whole country. The first wild wolves in 150 years were born in Germany in 2000, and the population has grown since then.
Wolf declines, on the other hand, might happen because of conflicts over livestock predation. Wolves can attack sheep and goats, which can drive farmers to kill wolves, even though killing wolves without specific permission has been illegal throughout much of Europe over the past decade.
The researchers found that wolves killed 56,000 domestic animals per year in the E.U., out of a total population of 279 million livestock.
“If you put this in perspective, it’s just 0.02 percent of all livestock heads in Europe. … Economically speaking, the damage is not serious,” says Boitani. “But at the local level, the individual farmer may lose 30 sheep or 50 sheep. … It’s something we have to address.”
Some European countries handle the conflict between farmers and the predators by compensating farmers for livestock losses. European countries spent €17 million (over $19 million) annually on compensation for damage attributed to wolves, with France paying the largest amount of any country, but Finland paying the most per wolf. The level of prevention of wolf attacks on livestock, like electric fences and guard dogs, varied across countries. Researchers propose more of a focus on these types of prevention efforts, since they can limit wolf damage and conflict. In three-quarters of European countries, government agencies and conservation organizations or projects financially support electric fences and guard dogs.
In addition to financial support to address human-wolf conflict, the researchers say wolf recovery in Europe has been made possible by substantial legal protections at the country level and at the E.U. level. Since 1979, the wolf has been listed as strictly protected according to the Bern Convention on the Conservation of European Wildlife and Natural Habitats, which meant a specific derogation, or exception, was needed to legally kill a wolf. A wolf could only be killed if it posed a serious threat to livestock or health.
In December 2024, all but three European countries chose to move wolves down to protected status, a change that went into effect this March. This change means a derogation won’t be needed to kill wolves, so countries that choose to cull wolf populations can do so more freely. If a country sets hunting quotas to manage wolf populations, for example, individual farmers would be allowed to cull wolves in their area.
Because wolves are so adaptable and able to spread across Europe so easily, moving beyond conservation and into management of their populations is important, says Håkan Sand, an ecologist at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, who was not involved in the new study. If these populations continue to grow at such an exceptional rate, there will be consequences for farmers, Sand adds.
What happens next comes down to how individual countries choose to handle managing their wolf populations. Downlisting wolves means countries can decide their own plans, says Boitani, for example to cull wolves in agricultural areas. But he says wolves will still be protected, with E.U. countries still required to maintain “favorable conservation status,” or “healthy numbers of wolves.” From a biological point of view, he predicts that wolves’ populations should not be threatened.
Healthy wolf populations help the entire ecosystem, since wolves manage populations of deer and other prey, causing a ripple effect that can balance the whole food web.
The researchers claim the next challenge for conservationists is to sustain wolf recovery, through national and international policies supporting human and wolf coexistence—as wolves expand, they’ll have to share more and more land with humans, and that could mean more conflicts.
Stigma against wolves leads people to fear being attacked, with their fears fed by inaccurate representations of wolves in the media. Yet wolf attacks on humans in Europe are extremely rare, with no fatal attacks recorded in Europe in the last 40 years. Education is an important tool to fight this misinformation, says the International Wolf Center’s Spickelmier.
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Controversy over wolf management can become more emotional and political than scientific. In Europe, wolves have become symbolic of wider social and political issues, including clashes between the interests of city dwellers and farmers.
Spickelmier says this is also true in the United States, where over 5,000 gray wolves roam the Lower 48. “People have a tendency to react very emotionally to wolves, whether in a positive or negative way,” he says.
“We are reaching a point with wolf conservation where values and attitudes are driving the decisions made around wolf conservation and recovery more than data and science,” adds Spickelmier. “That’s why education is so important.”
In addition to education, Boitani has seen in his work that assembling stakeholders from different sides can address this issue. One of these projects brought together farmers, environmentalists, scientists and government officials in Spain and Italy to have a dialogue about how best to manage conflict with wolves. These activities encouraged collaborative learning and built trust.
“At the end of the day, the amount to which wolves are able to thrive on a landscape comes down to that level of tolerance and willingness to put up with some of the impacts of wolves,” says Spickelmier. Since wolves are so ecologically important, he adds, it’s worth striving to find the balance between their survival and their impacts on their human neighbors.