Swiss Review 2/2020

Swiss Review / April 2020 / No.2 7 Nature photographer Peter A. Dettling took this photo of a feral wolf in Surselva in Au- gust 2006. It was one of the first such pic- tures taken without the help of a photo trap. along with the lynx, the badger and the fox. Basel’s wolf enclosure is now no more after Cleopatra and Caesar, the last-survivingmembers of an old wolf pack, were put to sleep on com- passionate grounds last summer. The zoo will no longer be housing wolves in future, but it is still possible to ad- mire the carnivore in several of Swit- zerland’s animal parks. Sympathy and antipathy In the wild, however, wolves are harder to spot as they shy away from humans. In 2006, nature photogra- pher Peter A. Dettling photographed a wolf in Surselva, one of the very first pictures of a feral wolf in Switzerland. The Swiss expatriate Dettling, 48, has been living mainly in Canada since 2002. It was there that he studied the social behaviour of wolf packs for a number of years in Banff National Park. Following the first-ever con- firmed sighting of a pack of wolves on the Calanda massif in 2012, Dettling returned toGrisons to document how these wolves were faring. Through presentations, field trips and books (see box), he has lifted the lid on an an- imal that, in his opinion, has been misunderstood and unjustly de- monised for centuries as a blood- thirsty predator. As the forebears of dogs, “wolves are our oldest allies and have therefore contributed greatly to humandevelopment”, Dettling argues. However, sheep and livestock farmers whose animals have been mauled by wolves are less than de- lighted about the lupine resurgence. A wolf’s natural instinct is to attack whenever easy pickings present themselves – entirely reasonable be- haviour as successful hunting in the wild is never assured. However, pan- icked sheep will in turn rouse the wolf’s killer instinct even more. This results in ‘massacres’ that leave herd- ers tearing their hair out. Now that sheep farmers have started to cut their losses by providing their flocks with better protection, the angry calls for wolves to be wiped out have died down somewhat. Wolf killings already allowed According to the carnivore ecology andwildlifemanagement foundation KORA, around 3,700 farm animals were killed by wolves between 1999 and 2018. On behalf of the federal government, KORA monitors Swit- zerland’s carnivore populations and the interactions that they have with humans and other animal popula- tions. Farmers who lose livestock due to wolf attacks receive financial com- pensation from the Confederation and cantons. However, this money will in future only be paid out to farmers who have adequately pro- tected their herds, e.g. by installing electric fences or using specially trained dogs to guard livestock enclo- sures and defend their occupants against wolf attacks. The federal gov- ernment subsidises these preventive measures to the tune of some three million Swiss francs a year. It is also permitted to kill wolves if the same wolf is shown to have been responsible for too many livestock losses; the red line is normally A Maremmano- Abruzzese sheepdog protecting its flock on the Grisons mountain pastures. Photo: Peter A. Dettling, www.TerraMagica.ca