Drome. Faced with the threat of wolves, the Alpine Departments work together to preserve pastoralism

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Formulated in March 2024 to the previous Minister of Agriculture, Marc Fesneau, the proposal remained unanswered. So the Department of the Drôme returns to the charge.

In a letter dated from Thursday October 17, 2024Marie-Pierre Mouton, president of the Departmental Council of Drôme, accompanied of the seven other Alpine Departments (Haute-Savoie, Savoie, Isère, Hautes-Alpes, Alpes-de-Haute-Provence, Alpes-Maritimes, Vaucluse), challenged the new Minister of Agriculture and Food Sovereignty, Annie Genevardon wolf predation.

The preservation of pastoralism

This approach is part of the continuity of the joint mobilization of the Alpine Departments to the preservation of pastoralisma method of breeding anchored in centuries-old Alpine traditions and based on animal grazing.

The observation is quite clear: the increase in wolf attacks over the last fifteen years is directly linked to the continued increase in the lupine population. Knowing that the Alps concentrate more than 80% of attacks and victims, and faced with the accumulation and worsening of damage caused to herds, the Alpine territories have taken the initiative, since the summer of 2023, to come together to convey an unequivocal message on the reality of the threat suffered by livestock farming and pastoralism: the preservation of these activities, all the more decisive for the balance of our territories as they are often the last, requires an approach concrete aiming at reducing the pressure exerted by the wolf.

For the head of the Department and her Alpine neighbors, “the existing herd protection measures – dedicated dogs, electrified fences, human guarding – are necessary and useful, but prove insufficient, because attacks continue at a very high rateclose to records, and the damage remains considerablesubjecting shepherds and breeders to permanent stress which exhausts them physically and morally and makes the exercise of their activity literally unbearable.”

According to the President of the Department, it is therefore necessary to restore the balance between wolf protection et the preservation of pastoral activities et breeding with a fair assessment of the lupine population. And this at the very moment when the Council of the European Union intends to modify the conservation status of the wolf listed in the Berne Convention by passing it from “strictly protected wildlife species” to “protected wildlife species”.

But in the meantime this revision of the hyperprotective status conferred on the wolf, the Alpine Departments do not intend to sit idly by…

The latter thus propose to coordinate a vast counting operation on the scale of the Alpine massif, during the summer of 2025in partnership with stakeholders: wolf scouts, French Biodiversity Office (OFB), hunters, environmental associations, elected officials, state services, volunteers, etc.

The provoked howl technique

For this operation, the Departments propose the use of the technique of provoked screams. A protocol validated by the OFB in 2020.

The main purpose of this method is to elicit howls from wolves, adults or cubs, and thus to determine, via an appropriate distribution of teams in the territory, the presence and spatial distribution of packs as well as the reproductions of the year.

The Alpine Departments are now waiting the green light from state services for the implementation of this operation: “In order to ensure the full success of this approach, we are naturally counting on the association of State services and the OFB in the preparation and application of this operation , knowing that it is the participation of all the actors and the supervisory authorities which will guarantee the reliability and credibility of this operation which can, in a second step, be generalized,” concludes the letter.

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