Wolf Story

I stood and watched a small part of a protest in Wiesbaden yesterday, and later in the evening....the full report came up on HR (our regional public TV network).  Kind of an interesting trendy topic.

As most of you know.....I essay occasionally on this Hessen trend of wolves.  For decades in Germany (maybe going back to the late 1800s)....we didn't have a wolf problem....they'd been hunted out of existence.  Adding to this, the Wall helped in some ways to prevent the reintroduction of wolves into western Germany.

Since 1989, the Wall is gone, and there's been pro-wolf efforts going on.  Naturally, as wolves have begun to arrive back into this region....sheep have been attacked and killed.

So this protest yesterday....oddly enough...was a bunch of anti-wolf enthusiasts, shepherds, cattlemen, and alpaca owners.  They want the Hessen state government to take action.

About 300 protesters started out at the train station and walked down to center-part of town (the Luisenplatz area), and held a pretty decent protest over the wolf situation.

The signs carried by the protest crowd?  Graphic images of dead sheep.

Last year's numbers?  Twenty-seven dead sheep.

What the shepherds are pointing out is that the attack-trend is such....that stress is now a daily thing for them, and they have to manage their 'herds' around the clock now.

The pro-wolf attitude within the government?  Well, some pointed this out and said that they (the government people) were more there to cuddle the wolves than handling the chaos.

So the Agricultural Minister was dragged into the protest discussion (Green Party member, Priska Hinz).  She made an appearance....to basically say that electrical fences were the way to protect the sheep, and hyped up their program to pay more for dead sheep (compensation money). 

At the end of this little speech....she kinda said in a direct way, you'd best get used to wolves because they are going to settle into Hessen, and you can't do anything about it.

As political figures go, she's more of a manager than a normal politician.  Her ending speech probably didn't make any of the protesters happy.

Here's the basic end-point....it is true that farmers don't lose a penny because of the government policy to pay them off for each dead sheep.  But to reach a level of feeling safe.....this is causing more man-hours, more stress, and more defensive measures.  All of this adds up.  Then the worry for Hinz (the Agricultural Minister) is that one day....one of the wolves will attack some kid and drag them off into the woods.....setting off a firestorm in the state, and triggering a massive hunt to extinguish all of the wolf population in the state. 

In the end, this is a modern day Hanzel and Greta type story, with the wolf surviving to the end-page, and then hunted down by the woodsman.