Sébastien Dubois takes it from there. As a royal wolf-catcher, Dubois is the latest in a centuries-long line of guardians entrusted by the rulers of France to rid the country of troublesome wolves. They did so in the 800s under the Emperor Charlemagne, and they do so in 2025 under the local prefects. Long gone are the gold-trimmed uniforms, the silver hunting knives, the throngs of hound dogs; now it’s technical outerwear, thermal cameras, high-tech rifles with night vision scopes—and tons of paperwork.
Often he stays out all night, always within 1,000 feet of the flock (the rules again). Usually, he hunts alone. He prefers it that way. It allows him to focus on the animal, immerse himself in its mind. “I shoot wolves, yes—that’s the job,” he told me. “But I respect them. We humans, we are fools compared to them. They are always one step ahead.”
France is at a dangerous point. There is just too little land and too much bloody history for human-wolf relationships to be easily settled.
The scene may have been peaceful, but Giraud’s voice was tense. Everything changed on June 16, 2019, he told me. More than 100 sheep killed in three nights—a massacre. When his daughter woke up for school, there were dead bodies all around the house. She was only four at the time. “It was horrible,” Giraud said. To protect the sheep, he started sleeping in his car, which he parked near the flock. In five months, he stayed home only a couple of times. He’s not sure why his wife hasn’t left him. “These dates are burned into my memory,” he said, and started to cry.
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.
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.
The gray wolf appeared in Europe about 400,000 years ago, then crossed to North America over the Bering Land Bridge, which linked the continents during ice ages. The species was remarkably successful. Split into over 30 subspecies, from the bulky Yukon wolf to the slender Arabian, it has colonized the Northern Hemisphere. Roughly 40,000 to 15,000 years ago, some wolves became dogs, either because humans selected the docile ones as companions or because certain wolves domesticated themselves for easy access to leftover food.
In ancient Greece, prizes for killing wolves were offered as early as the sixth century BCE. In Rome, hunters called luparii scattered poisoned meatballs to rid the countryside of wolves, but the practice was likely uncommon. At the time, the wolf was often admired in Europe. The Romans believed the founders of their city were nursed by a she-wolf. Then Christianity changed everything with its idea of Jesus as the lamb of God. The wolf became a symbol of evil, a threat to the holy flock—and the hunting began in earnest.
By the 1930s, effectively no wolves were left in France, however, and very few in the rest of Europe. (In the lower 48 U.S. states, wolves were nearly decimated by the 1960s.) They were driven to extinction by habitat loss, poaching, and, yes, wolf-catchers. Yet bizarrely, the positions survived, as wolf-catchers took to chasing deer off crops instead. The only thing wolf-related was their name—and the buttons on their uniforms.
There are now more than 20,000 wolves across 23 EU countries. (In the contiguous United States, there are around 8,000.) In France, the official number for 2024 was 1,013, up from zero in 1991. Yet Adrian Treves, an environmental scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, doesn’t like such precise numbers. “To give the public one number is to treat the public like idiots,” he explained. “We never know the exact number of wolves. Never.”
Jérémy Lopez, the head of the pastoralism unit at Digne’s Departmental Directorate for Territorial Affairs, whose name fittingly derives from Latin for wolf, found himself in the middle of a howling survey in 2019. “It was very strange,” he told me. There were several teams trained to imitate wolves, spread out across Alpine slopes. After the sun set, the humans started howling, each person going on for about 30 seconds. Lopez joined, too. “It looked like a bunch of people hanging about trying to sound like wolves, with traffic cones for megaphones,” he laughed. Then, the wolves responded: first one pack, then another. “We ended up in the middle of two packs answering each other, and that went on for like 45 minutes,” Lopez said. It was at once silly, awesome, and humbling.
And they do breed fast, at least in Europe. The numbers of wolves across the continent, as imprecise as they may be, are up more than 50 percent over a decade. In Germany, between 2015 and 2023, the number of wolf packs increased over four times. For some, that breeds fear. What also breeds fear are media reports on wolf attacks, many of them inaccurate. A 2021 study by Arbieu and his colleagues found that articles in which the victim was allegedly bitten by a wolf tend to be more misleading—the headlines exaggerated and sensational—than those describing dog attacks.
Over the past decades, no humans were killed by wolves in Europe. That’s not to say it couldn’t happen. Europeans did fall victim to wolves’ jaws in the past, as evidenced by data from parish death registries. There were plenty of legends, too, such as that of La bête de Touraine, a monster of a wolf that supposedly terrorized France sometime in the late seventeenth century. It was said to have devoured more than 250 people.
While modern Europeans are unlikely to fall victim to wolves, that’s not the case for their livestock. In 2023, wolves killed more than 10,000 farm animals in France, about a fifth of the total number of those killed across the union. That’s between two and three sheep, cows, or goats per wolf—and much more than claimed by their American cousins. (In Montana, which has an estimated wolf population of 1,096, only 31 cattle and sheep were killed in 2023.)
Julien Giraud appreciates the compensation he gets for the sheep he loses to wolves. Yet he believes that all this talk about money misses the point. “People say, ‘You’re compensated—what are you whining about?’ But until you’ve experienced it, people can’t understand,” he said. For him, it’s about the trauma of seeing your sheep gutted and bleeding all over your fields. It’s about having to finish them off to end their suffering. It’s about feeling alone with that trauma and about no one listening, really listening. It’s about governments making decisions up there in Paris and Brussels and pushing them onto farmers like him. “It’s not about the money,” he told me, shaking his head.
Two triggers for the protests were the new Common Agricultural Policy, formally passed in January 2023, and the European Green Deal. In order to make the continent’s agriculture more planet-friendly, these policies required farmers to set aside more land to support biodiversity, rotate crops, and reduce pesticide use, all while adding red tape. To many farmers, it sounded like making a tough life even tougher.
The EU changed the law to make killing wolves easier apparently to placate farmers and preserve “rural livelihoods.” Some critics said that the move was not really about the farmers, but the result of a personal vendetta of Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president, whose beloved pony, Dolly, was killed in 2022 by a wolf in Beinhorn, Germany. Later, von der Leyen was quoted as saying that European wolves had “become a real danger for livestock and potentially also for humans.” Many researchers and environmental NGOs were appalled by the weakened protections, calling them a “major blow to science.” Wolves are not the enemy, they said—they bring important benefits to both nature and humanity. Take road accidents, for example. A study in Wisconsin showed that wolves make roads safer: Their presence in the state reduced collisions with deer by almost a quarter. It’s not simply that wolves eat prey so that there are fewer deer caught in literal headlights. With large predators around, the prey “start behaving differently,” Kuijper said. Deer, moose, and boars have to be on a constant lookout, which also includes paying more attention while crossing roads.
Yet the problem with downgrading protection of wolves, critics say, is not simply that these predators benefit ecosystems; it’s also that killing them often does little to actually protect farms (even if you wiped them all out, other predators would likely replace them). Slovakia is a case in point. A study in this central European country found no relationship between the number of wolves hunted down and the number of sheep lost by farmers. In France, the results of similar studies were mixed. On three sites, killing wolves brought the desired effects (sheep spared); on five sites, there were no effects; and on one site, the hunting actually backfired, with more livestock devoured by wolves.
Scientists and NGOs argue that instead of simply killing wolves, we should focus on nonlethal control options, such as electric fencing, guard dogs, and shepherds. “If you don’t protect livestock, you can forget about preventing conflicts with wolves,” Kuijper said. One effective technique is fladry—a rope with flags that flutter in the wind, scaring off wolves. Electric fencing works, too, but it cuts through landscapes, preventing wildlife from moving freely. To complicate matters, wolves are fast learners. Fences can be jumped over or dug under. In one study, fladry worked for two months, and then it didn’t: The wolves figured out thxat it was just flapping cloth.
On the day I visited, Bach’s barn smelled of fresh hay. Among a group of brown goats, three cream Anatolian shepherd puppies played with an empty bucket, their thick legs uncertain on a carpet of straw. They were born here, right within the herd. To be a good guardian, Bach tells me, a dog has to identify with the herd—not as a sheep or as a goat, but as their family. “Before his eyes even open, he hears the sounds of sheep, the sounds of goats, and he smells them,” Bach said. The dog gets attached to livestock, and his protective instincts, hardwired within the breed, kick in. If one day a wolf approaches the herd, the dog will feel the sheep’s distress—and he will do anything to protect them. One time, Bach heard sheep bells in the middle of the night, going off in every direction. He jumped out of bed and ran outside in his underwear. “The dogs were going wild,” he said. They barked, and they won. The wolves gave up.
For Zimmermann, these feelings—the exhaustion, the frustration, the sadness—mean that the whole discussion of the pluses and minuses of different methods of controlling wolves misses the point. It’s not about the efficacy of fladry versus fencing, or whether shooting a certain number of wolves would limit attacks. Using ideas from peace-building, Zimmermann and her colleagues identified three levels of human-wildlife conflict. The first, and the mildest, is when things are just beginning to stir, when people are still willing to talk, and practical measures such as fencing can fix the problem. That’s where human-elephant conflicts in northeast India stand. At level two, the waters become muddier: Some hurtful things were said in the past, other things were not done, and resentment is growing. At level three, the conflict becomes about identities, not animals. You know when you’ve hit level three when people start using polarized language, when they talk about threats to their way of life, about not being heard. “There is deliberate blaming of each other, hostility, completely different realities,” Zimmermann said. That’s wolves in Europe. “Wolves do seem to be an extreme case, where they’re more polarizing than any other wildlife that we’ve studied,” Treves observed.
Pergolizzi is not your stereotypical right-wing farmer. She is anti-pesticide and worries about climate. Her house is dotted with organic products. She produces meat, but tells people to eat less of it: In her view, meat should be nature’s gift, celebrated on special occasions. In the wolf debate, she feels she is caught in between the conservative rural right and the green urban left.
Sometimes Dubois plays the therapist himself. “I’ve seen farmers—tough guys, hardened types—who’ve been holding it together for months, but when I called them, I found them in tears,” Dubois said. “There are farmers—the wolves have broken something in them. We’ve seen it happen. Sometimes the wolf-catcher goes to meet the farmer before a nighttime patrol and never leaves. He stays to talk for hours.”
Talking and listening are also at the heart of mediation—one thing that, according to Zimmermann, can actually help solve human-wildlife conflicts that have reached level three. “You really need to start bringing in people who know how to resolve conflicts, do mediation work—that’s a completely different skill set from your classic natural scientist,” she explained. Such mediators need to get to the bottom of things. Is it about cheap food imports from outside the continent? Is it about subsidies going to the wrong places? Or is it about feeling ignored? In Denmark, “The Wolf Dialogue Project,” which involved a group of people from across the political spectrum, took over two years, but ended up reducing polarization and producing several potential solutions to test, such as DNA identification of problem wolves. A similar approach, based on a method called Multicriteria Decision Analysis, showed promise in Italy.
Pergolizzi accepts that sometimes wolves may need to be shot, even though she doesn’t like the idea. “I’m not anti-wolf, despite everything. If I see one among my cows and I can legally kill it, I will. But I would really like us to talk about this—about the killing, about that violence—because it’s part of nature, too,” she said. She feels that, so far, there is not much real discussion about wolves in France, just two sides shouting at each other. “What exhausted me was feeling judged, unsupported, misunderstood,” she said. Everything is black and white, and so polarized. “It’s insane,” she added.
But nature is not black and white—just like the wolf, it’s all about shades of gray. Yes, nature is wild, it’s beautiful, it’s free—but it’s violent, too. Nature is full of complexity, Pergolizzi said, and that complexity is what we need right now in the public discourse on wolves. “There is no easy solution,” she reflected. “We just need to understand each other.” The phone at Digne’s DDT keeps ringing.
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