Gray Wolf

“Wolf populations in Europe quadrupled between 1970 and 2005 and there may now be 25,000 animals, says the International Union for Conservation of Nature. They have been seen within a few miles of major cities including Berlin, Rome and Athens . . . the Dutch hamlet of Luttelgeest . . . expanding their range in France, Germany, Poland, Scandinavia and Italy, with sightings in Belgium and Denmark.”

“. . . farmers spotted a pack of wolves in a village 15 miles south of Berlin for the first time in more than 100 years . . . Germany’s “last wolf” was reputed to have been shot and killed by hunters in 1904. In 1990, a year after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the animals were declared a protected species and the population began to grow again. Wolves were sighted in remote areas of eastern Germany after they entered from neighbouring Poland.”

The grey wolf is listed among the strictly protected species under the Bern Convention. It was “the first international treaty to protect both species and habitats and to bring countries together to decide how to act on nature conservation.”

“A Wolf Specialist Group convenes its first major meeting, sponsored by the IUCN and WWF. Studies from around the world are shared and the group develops a manifesto. The first principle states a case for the wolf that has rarely been expressed in the past: ‘Wolves, like all other wildlife, have a right to exist in a wild state.’”

“In the former Soviet Union from 1925 to 1992, an estimated 1.6 million wolves were killed, ten times the population of that vast territory.”

“By the early 1900s, wolves are extinct in Great Britain, Ireland, France, Belgium, Netherlands, Denmark, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Hungary and Japan, ‘including 80% of China and India.’”

“In Saxon times wolves were very abundant; and even so recently as the reign of Elizabeth they were to be seen on Dartmoor and in the Forest of Dean. In the New Forest they were hunted in the twelfth century. It would seem that the last English wolf was slain sometime during the reign of Henry VII. In Scotland, however, they persisted very much longer. So recently as 1743 was the last killed.”

“They shall at all times keep us informed about wolves, how many each of them has caught, and shall have the skins delivered to us. And in the month of May they are to seek out the wolf cubs and catch them, with poison and hooks as well as with pits and dogs.”

“‘He gave five drachmas for every wolf that was killed, and one drachma for every wolf’s whelp.’ Plutarch reports on Solon’s law, one of the earliest records of a wolf bounty.”

A polychrome painting of a wolf found in the Font de Gaume Cave in Southern France reveals the wolf’s once widespread distribution throughout Europe, North America, the “Middle East, south into the Arabian Peninsula and across Asia as far east as Japan . . . As a species, Canis lupus has been . . . the world’s most widely distributed wild/non-domesticated land mammal, apart from Homo sapiens.”