Translator: Carlo Maiolini Reviewer: Denise RQ
Today, wolves are definitely ones of the most controversial animals
in the world.
Usually, people either love them or hate them.
Consequently, any public discussion about wolf management
gets very emotional, sometimes even irrational.
But nevertheless, the most important factor today
in wolf management and wolf conservation
are humans and their attitude towards the wolves.
I would even say that in general,
in wolf management and conservation there is, perhaps, 10% an issue of biology
while human sociology, psychology, and politics are much more important.
When I was a young wildlife biologist, I preferred more than anything
to just stay in the forest and do fieldwork.
Actually, I still do.
But during my years of study on large carnivores,
I learned more and more about wolves,
I started to realize
just how many misbeliefs there are about wolves among many people.
Then also, how many of these misbeliefs affected the wolf management.
So in time, I eventually felt that I have to share more of our results
from our studies on wolves, and our experiences, with other people.
For I guess this also is one of the reasons I am standing here today.
In wolf discussions, in public discussions about wolves,
one of the topics that regularly comes out
is the danger of wolves attack on people.
But how rational this fear of wolf attacks really is?
Out of curiosity, how many of you think that wolves attack people?
OK. I'm glad to see not too many hands.
Because in spite of all fairy tales, old stories, or Hollywood movies
that often portray wolves as bloodthirsty human killers,
the fact is that wolves are not dangerous to people.
For example, in Slovenia,
we don't have a single confirmed record on wolves that hurt anyone,
even though, every year,
there are several encounters between wolves and people.
In other countries, wolf attacks are practically unknown, or extremely rare
and even when they do happen,
they may be limited to wolves infected by rabies.
But the general fact is healthy wolves don't attack people.
I can confirm this with my personal experiences as well,
because during our fieldwork,
I found myself interacting with a wolfpack several times.
But as you can see, I am still alive.
For example, one day,
when we were checking the locations of GPS-collared wolves,
I've come upon this little cave.
I climbed inside; when I was inside, I turned on my torch,
and I suddenly realized that there were five little wolf pups in front of me.
Standing among them, there was a large alpha female;
maybe at a two-meter distance in front of me.
Like in all other similar situations, nothing happened.
[This is the den after I got out.]
So not only wolves don't consider people as potential prey
they don't even attack us when they feel frightened.
So any fear of wolf attacks on humans is completely irrational.
However, wolves are still predators.
It's their way of life, it's how they get food;
it is actually also the role they have in the ecosystem:
to kill other animals,
mainly, large herbivores, ungulates.
In Slovenia, we have three main species,
three species wolves prey on:
wild ungulates.
These are the red deer, the roe deer, and the wild boar.
They constitute about 90% of the wolves' diet here in Slovenia.
But occasionally, wolves also attack domestic animals;
especially sheep.
These attacks on livestock
- so called depredations -
are today the main challenge in wolf management.
How could we solve this problem?
The first thing we tried was to kill the wolves.
A lot of wolves had been killed.
For example, in the last year, in Slovenia,
almost one third of the entire wolf population was killed by people.
In large part, these wolf killings occured in the past
based on the assumption
that if you kill more wolves, they will kill less sheep.
But is this really true?
In the last-- - yeah, for over ten years now -
our government has been issuing or prescribing quotas for wolf culling,
it means legally killing wolves.
So we said, "OK, we have done this for many years now.
Let's see what was the effect of that; what have we achieved?
Is this assumption really right?"
So we analyzed the data of the number of wolves shot every year,
and how then this translated in trends in depredations of sheep.
What was the result?
No connection whatsoever.
All these shootings of wolves had absolutely no effect on depredations.
To be honest with you, this is nothing new for science,
because there have been several similar studies done previously
in other countries.
They all came to same conclusion:
shooting of wolves is completely ineffective
and doesn't prevent livestock depredations
unless, of course, you exterminate the entire wolf population in the area.
In several cases, they even observed
that when they started to shoot the wolves or when they increased the quota,
the depredations also increased.
This may not seem logical at first,
especially if you view it from the livestock breeding perspective:
more cows will eat more grass;
you remove some cows, they will eat less grass.
But it is different with wolves.
Simply put, wolves are not cows.
Wolves have a very complex social system,
and wolves do not need humans to control their population either.
To understand how this works,
we have to know more on wolf biology, and especially their social system.
So let's take a quick look at wolves' way of life.
The most important aspect of their biology is that they are social animals.
So they live in groups called packs;
packs are actual families.
They are led by a dominant breeding pair,
the so-called 'alpha male' and 'alpha female.'
They are the father and mother of the pack
because all other pack members are usually their offspring,
- their 'daughters' and 'sons.'
The second important aspect in a wolf social system
is that wolves are territorial.
Each pack fearlessly defend their territory against any other wolves.
Actually, if they catch any other wolf that is not a member of their pack
on their territory,
they'd immediately kill it or at least chase it away.
So when you look at the spatial distribution of the wolfpacks,
practically, you always see something like this.
This is a map showing
the Dinaric mountains of Slovenia and its neighboring part in Croatia.
Each polygon represents a territory, borders of territory of one wolfpack.
As you probably noticed,
these packs, these territories don't overlap each other,
they are separated.
Or maybe they just touch, slightly overlapping on the borders
so that in every area in each territory there is always only one pack.
Wolves self-regulate themselves this way
so there cannot be too many wolves.
Even in areas with no wolf hunting,
they don't overpopulate or exterminate their prey
because they have this in-built self-regulation
which is based on territoriality.
Next question is,
"How do wolves communicate among themselves?
How do they know which area is occupied, which territory is empty?
Where are the borders of the territories?"
They use two ways of communication: chemical and vocal.
For example, one thing they do is pee.
And they pee a lot.
Like your dogs, when you take them out for a walk.
Such urine-marking is a message to all the other wolves
that this territory is occupied.
But unlike dogs
where males raise their legs when they pee and females squat,
with wolves it is not like that.
With wolves, it doesn't depend on the sex of the animal
but on its social status.
So alpha male and alpha female both raise their leg.
Males still do it a little higher than females, above the hip
while the subordinate wolves, females and males, they all squat.
Beside these chemical messages,
another thing that wolves do is something like this.
(Imitating a wolf howl)
(Applause)
They howl.
One of the functions of this howling
it is also a message to all the other wolves,
"This is our territory. Go away or we are going to kill you."
This way, wolves maintain this territorial system.
We have now learned how wolves regulate the number of packs,
but next question is,
"If new pups are born in each pack every year,
how do they regulate the number of wolves in each pack
in order not to be too many?"
The system is quite simple.
What they do is that the alpha male and the alpha female stay together
all their life, in the pack,
while the pups
- those of them who survive, of course -
when they grow up, all leave sooner or later;
they leave the native pack - the pack in which they were born.
Like this young female; her name was Twiggy.
she was equipped with a radio collar with a GPS device
so we could follow her movements precisely.
You can see the territory of her native pack.
This is the pack into which she was born.
She lived with her parents, brothers, and sisters for several years
but then, like with any other wolf who grows up
- usually, between age two and four -
she left her parents and went searching for two things.
One was an empty territory,
and the other was a mate to start a new pack.
Twiggy was very lucky, because relatively soon,
she found an empty territory here on the Menišija plateau,
and she could settle down.
Soon enough, she also found herself a boyfriend.
You can see them in this photo taken by an automatic photocamera.
In the back, you see a wolf with a radio collar; that's her.
In front, a young male.
This is a typical way a new wolfpack is established.
Usually, when wolves leave their native pack,
they go few tens of kilometers, like Twiggy;
then, either find an empty territory or they die.
Some wolves are special.
One of those special wolves was a young male named Slavc.
He was also radio collared so we could follow his movements,
and today, Slavc is one of the most famous wolves in Europe.
He was born into a pack called "Pack Slavnik"
- you can see their territory on the map;
this territory stretches from Trieste in Italy
across Slovenia, Primorska region, all the way down to Utcka, in Croatia.
As you probably noticed, wolves don't care about our borders,
even if you change them.
For wolves it is exactly the same;
if it is a Croatian forest or a Slovenian forest.
When Slavc was two and half years old,
he left his native pack like any other wolf,
but he was special because he went very far away.
This is his path after leaving his native pack.
He crossed the entire Slovenia, went over Crevanke, into Austria,
that was the fourth country he was already into;
continued north, all the way to the border of the state of Salzburg,
there he turned to the South West
crossing a large part of Austrian Alps, Italian Alps, all the way down to Verona.
This here is Gardaland.
(Laughter)
He walked over 1,000 kilometers,
and then he settled in a region called Lessinia Natural Regional Park
where he met a female.
Because this love story happened near Verona,
the place of the famous play by William Shakespeare,
the Italian media, of course, named the female "Juliet."
(Laughter)
You can see them in this photo also taken by an automatic camera
by our colleagues in Italy.
In front, there is Slavc,
and in the back, you can see maybe the eyes of Juliet.
Why did Slavc went so far away?
We are not completely sure,
but we like to joke he probably wanted to have an Italian girlfriend.
(Laughter)
When a new wolfpack is established by one male and one female,
they have pups.
Eventually, these pups grow up,
and we have this typical wolfpack - a family.
These wolves stay together for many years
unless one of the alphas die;
either the alpha male or the alpha female.
When this happens,
the wolfpack structure is destroyed.
In many cases, the entire pack just dissolves.
This is something we are seeing now in Slovenia very frequently,
mainly because of the high hunting quotas.
Actually now, the genetic analysis in Slovenia showed
that wolfpacks in Slovenia are very unstable
because of all these killings;
legal and illegal, either happening.
Actually, it seems now our population is not functioning normally anymore
as it would in natural conditions.
It is something like if you imagine that you want to start a family,
and they would kill your wife or husband every second year.
Another side effect of the culling of wolves
is that, when you remove few members from the pack,
the survivors - the other members of the pack -
if the stay together,
they have difficulties hunting their natural prey - deer, wild boars.
Because to successfully hunt wild ungulates,
you need cooperation and teamwork.
So what happens?
They go for easier prey, and these are sheep.
So this is the explanation why--
It explains these observations
when you start shooting wolves or increase the quota;
depredations on livestock by wolves increase even more.
So we can now learn that with killing wolves,
we will not be able to achieve much, including depredations.
So what else could we do?
How could we prevent these depredations?
To answer this question, our colleagues from the Slovenia Forest Service analyzed
these depredations by wolves on sheep in detail,
and they come up with some really interesting discoveries.
For example, they noted that the entire Slovenia wolf range
- so where the wolves live here -
encloses about 3,000 active sheep breeders.
But among these 3,000 sheep breeders,
the majority of all the compensations paid for wolves attacks on sheep
go to less than ten owners.
So about 2,900 sheep breeders from the wolf range
have no problems with wolves,
and a very small number of them suffered a lot of attacks on sheep
year after year after year.
So we said, "This is rather unusual.
Let's try to figure out why there are these big differences.
Why are there few problematic pastures that are under attack all the time,
while all these other pastures around them have no problems?"
So we analyzed different parameters: distance from the pastures to the forest,
size of the sheep flock, which wolfpack was present in the area, and so on,
but none of these parameters explained these differences.
So we said, "Let's check what kind of protection is being used."
What we observed was on these pastures with a lot of problems
there was a very poor protection.
For example, no electricity in the electric fences,
or very low current, or the enclosures themselves.
Sometimes, we even observed funny things
like owners bringing dead sheep and putting them on the pasture
and then claiming compensation for wolf attack.
So we said, "OK.
Let's then try to improve the protection of these few problematic pastures."
So we selected a few of them with a lot of problems in the previous years,
and we equipped them with good electric fences;
and for those who wanted, we also donated livestock guarding dogs to them.
What were the results?
No more wolf attacks whenever this good protection was used.
Just by equipping five pastures in Slovenia,
already in the first year,
we saved over 100, 000 euros of our tax money
that otherwise, is spent in compensations.
So it seems now that--
(Applause)
So it seems now that we have an effective way
to prevent, at least a large part of these depredations.
Of course, this means also some additional work for the owners.
The main problem my colleagues are having right now
is that when they offered, for free, this good protection
to the owners who had most problems in Slovenia,
most of them refused this offer.
So, our next step now will be to try to find ways to motivate
these few owners with a lot of problems to improve the protection of their sheep.
So it seems that in the end, we are again back to people.
Most likely, we won't be able to explain to the wolves
that they shouldn't take our sheep,
but with our intelligence, which we are so proud of,
I am sure we can find ways
to prevent wolves from reaching our sheep,
and they would go for their natural prey.
Actually, as we have seen, it seems the knowledge is already there.
What we need now is motivation to start using this knowledge,
so that in the end, as we have a saying in Slovenian,
"Wolf will be fat and sheep alive,"
in our case, literally.
Thank you for your attention.
(Applause)