Dutch Court Allows Shooting Wolves With Paintball Gun Following Study That Species In The Area Exhibit Unnatural Behavior

(Photo : Getty Images/KIM MI-OK)

A Dutch court ruled that officials may shoot paintball guns at wolves at a popular national park to scare them away after a study said some animals were exhibiting unnatural behavior.

Serious Threat

The ruling was a victory for Gelderland, the eastern province that had used paintball guns to scare wild wolves away. Wolves are protected in the Netherlands and cannot be hunted.

After a lengthy legal battle, a court in Utrecht ruled that the behavior of some wolves in the De Hoge Veluwe National Park posed "a serious threat to public safety.".

The park is popular among hikers and cyclists, and it also houses the Kröller-Müller Museum, a world-renowned art institution. It is also home to species such as deer, mouflon sheep, and wild boar. Wolves have routinely assaulted these creatures in recent years.

According to the court, one female wolf has been observed approaching bikers and walkers and showing no fear when photographers approached her.

"The fact that the wolf seems to be less and less afraid of people does not mean that the animal can no longer become aggressive and bite," the court said in its ruling.

Other ways of scaring off the wolves at the national park, such as shouting, had been ineffective, the court said, and pepper spray was deemed unsafe for the animals.

In an interim verdict issued in September of last year, the court ruled that Gelderland's strategy had been haphazardly constructed and was not sufficiently motivated.

Among other things, the province did not provide conclusive evidence that the wolf was demonstrating problematic behavior and did not fully investigate alternatives to the paintball gun.

In the interim, Gelderland consulted a wolf behavior expert with vast expertise in studying and investigating the animal. His study cited 14 sightings of wolves in De Hoge Veluwe Park and concluded that one or more wolves exhibit abnormal behavior.

Another wolf expert from the University of Ljubljana corroborated the results.

The expert decided that if the paintball gun is used correctly and not pointed directly at the animal's eyes, it is a safe tool.

Protection Status

The decision came as Europe grapples with a wolf population that has recovered from near extinction.

The European Commission announced in December that it intended to change the animals' protected status, allowing them to be hunted, after evidence revealed they were posing a growing threat to livestock.

Brussels has asked EU member countries to change the protection classification of wolves from "strictly protected" to "protected," allowing them to be hunted under strict regulations.

The commission stressed that there are around 20,300 wolves throughout the EU, and "damage to livestock has increased as the wolf population has grown.".

According to commission research, wolves kill at least 65,000 head of livestock in the EU each year, with sheep and goats accounting for 73%, cattle for 19%, and horses and donkeys for 6%.

Ursula von der Leyen, the head of the European Commission, lost her beloved senior pony, Dolly, to a wolf that entered its enclosure in her family's rural home in northern Germany in September.