ENVIRONMENT-NORWAY: Howling for wolf rights

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Jan Skjelbek

OSLO, Mar 24 1999 (IPS) - Nowegian wolves, on the point of extinction in 1973, have managed to slightly increase their numbers – to the cheers of conservationists and the annoyance of farmers who claim their sheep herds are suffering.

The farmers were even more upset this week when a court delayed a decision on whether two particular wolves could be killed until after the hunting season ends here next month. This effectively grants the pair of predators the legal right to live one more year.

The two wolves, a male and a female couple, were under sentence of death since Minister of the Environment Guro Fjellanger issued an order on March 5 that they be killed because the wolves had entered grounds set aside for sheep.

The wolves proved elusive, however, and time and again gave hunters the slip by vanishing into Norway’s snowy south-eastern mountains.

Then came the court ruling in their favour which, in turn, gave conservationists time to fight the government’s death sentence.

“We will seek a court order through the Court of Enforcement to stop the hunt as soon as possible,” said Viggo Ree, press officer for the Norwegian nature organisation Carnivore and Raptor Society. “Fortunately time is working in our favour as it is impossible for the judicial system in this country to make any ruling before the hunting season ends on April 15.”

Sheep farmers in the Norwegian municipalities of Stor-Elvdal and Rendalen in the county of Hedmark, 150 kilometres north of the capital were not pleased at the news. They feared more of their sheep would be taken by the wolves and the most pessimistic talked about a “bloodbath on the pastures.”

Farmers claimed that as many as 1,000 sheep had fallen prey to the wolves last year and maintained that the predators were driving them out of business.”

Ree countered there were other reasons the farmers were ignoring for the deaths of their sheep – such as drowning, eating poisoned plants and the so-called “tipover”, when a sheep rolls over and is unable to get up again to east or drink.

Ree said there were two million sheep in Norway but only 10 wolves lived on this side of the border with Sweden and another 70 in Sweden itself.

The Norwegian government has stated its goal was to keep the wolf population reproducing within the state borders, enshrined in a government act in 1997.

Ree said any decision to eliminate the wolf pair would be out of line with the idea of upholding the creature’s being.

“Although there are more wolves in Norway and Sweden today than in the 1980s, the genetic variation is much poorer than in this period,” he said. “so what we are looking at is, in fact, a population of wolves that is in danger of being wiped out.”

There are many myths and untruths spinning around wolves, but there is little evidence that they are as dangerous as some people like to think, Ree said.

Unless they are frightened or starved, there are few examples that the wolves are as big and bad as they are presented in the children’s story “Little Red Riding Hood.”

“It is not in their nature to hunt humans, rather it’s the other way around,” Ree said.

The last recorded case of a person being killed by a wolf was in 1800 – and the victim was a small child.

Some Norwegians have come up with different suggestions to solve what they see as a predator-problem.

They include the Central Party which would keep the wolverine and lynx in Norway while Sweden and Finland would contain the remaining population of wolves and bears. These four species are the only large predators left in Scandinavia.

The party’s plan allows for the wolves that are in Norwegian territory to stay on, but only if they were kept behind barbed wire fences.

This proposal aroused a media stir over animal rights which became quite heated. A survey by Feedback Research, published in the newspaper Nationen, showed that 40.7 percent of Norwegians polled were in favour of killing the two animals and 40.4 percent were against while 18.9 percent had not made up their minds.

In addition to the Centre Party, other political groups favouring “Death to the Wolves” were Christian Democrats and the Left Party. The Socialist Left Party, however, was “wolf friendly.”