That’s not true. Wolves are incredibly smart animals and will find and exploit weak points in otherwise expensive fencing systems. They also jump surprisingly high. Moreover, once they manage to cross a fence they do not kill to feed. Instead, they slaughter entire herds of sheep for the sport of it. I personally think wolves are incredible animals, but their sudden reintroduction in the Netherlands feels ill thought out.
“In a paper published in 2016, “The first proof of the recent presence of Wolves in the Netherlands,” authors wrote:
“In light of the expansion of wolves from the Polish border to the northwest of Germany and the sightings in Denmark, the appearance of the wolf in the Netherlands was no surprise to most experts. In March 2015, this expectation was fulfilled when, after generations without resident wolves, a single wolf wandered through the Dutch provinces of Drenthe and Groningen in broad daylight. From 7 to 10 March 2015, the Netherlands witnessed the comeback of an iconic species.”
Since 2019, the country has once again become home to its first pack of wolves with young pups after 150 years. Genetic sampling revealed the Netherlands wolves came from an Alpine population and Central European populations (i.e. Germany)“
> That’s not true. Wolves are incredibly smart animals and will find and exploit weak points in otherwise expensive fencing systems.
Pair the sheep and goat herds with one or two decent sheepdogs - Kangals/Karabaş, Ovcharka (in Slavic languages, ovce means sheep, so their purpose is literally their name) or similar large breeds. That is usually enough to drive off wolves to feed off of deer instead that are a true scourge for forestry when the hunters don't keep up.
Yes they can sometimes learn to jump high fences. And that particular incident could have been prevented if people were employing early warning detection systems.
Wolves don’t just encounter a farm and instantly jump over the fences. They would have been around for a significant period of time before doing that. And during that period they could have been detected and that attack prevented in all likelihood. This of course needs proper research but wolves are very cautious.
The wolf attack in question where a wolf jumped a fence 20 times could have been detected or cut short if an electronic detection system had been employed.
These systems have the potential to make a positive difference.
But these ways are not really being tried yet, 10 years later. We are not as adaptive as wolves it seems. Maybe that can change soon though.
I know, because I have developed such a system and studied a pack with it in Belgium the past year.
I captured wolves on video more than 60 times during that period. And in that period only 2x times were the wolves hanging around the farmers field which had horses (rather than simply passing by). I called the farmer and the wolves dispersed. The videos of this are also online.
The system uses thermal imaging and the University of Helsinki have incorporated the images into a thermally trained AI model. PIR sensors can detect wolves a relatively short distance away. But this system can detect wolves and label them as such at 50m or more.
Describing the slaughter as sport would not be accurate. The situation is an unnatural situation as the sheep have no way to escape. In a natural situation the prey would have had the opportunity to disperse.
If you try to break up a fight between domesticated dogs you would also note that they enter a different state of mind during such an attack. In these cases the trapped sheep just make the situation worse.
The fence however serves a very good purpose which in most cases would do its job. And in this particular case it’s also useful, it serves as a natural barrier to allow time for a detection system to detect the wolf and potentially invoke a response system. But it’s quite clear we need to adapt a little quicker ourselves, indeed our response was ill thought out.
