The Fence

Germany added the wolf to the Federal Hunting Act. The farmers who coexist with wolves asked for fencing subsidies. Parliament gave them a hunting license instead.

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“A lone wolf is a bad wolf,” René Gomringer told Earth Island Journal. “A good pack, an educated pack, is among the best protections.”

Gomringer has been raising sheep in Bavaria since 1980. When wolves began establishing territories in his region --- the first confirmed packs in a state that had not seen them for over a century --- he did not lobby for their removal. He built electric fences. He acquired Mastín Español guardian dogs. He founded a consulting office and began teaching other Bavarian farmers how to protect their flocks without killing the predator. In the Altmühltal, Robert Eberler runs 400 sheep behind electric fencing with guardian dogs he walks past every morning.

When The Local asked Bavarian sheep farmers what they wanted from their politicians, the answer was consistent: financial support for electric fences and guardian dogs. Not a hunting license.

On March 5, 2026, the Bundestag voted to add the wolf to the Federal Hunting Act.

CDU/CSU, AfD, and SPD voted in favor. The Greens and Die Linke voted against. The Bundesrat approved on March 27. The law entered force April 2. German states can now set their own wolf hunting regulations. An animal that was strictly protected under European law for three decades became a game species in under thirty days of legislative process.

The trajectory that produced this law is one of conservation’s most documented successes. In 2000, a single breeding pair was confirmed in Saxony --- the first wolves in Germany in over 150 years. By the 2024—25 monitoring year, the federal monitoring agency counted 219 packs, 43 pairs, and 14 territorial individuals across 13 states. At least 1,636 wolves. The population grew roughly 30 percent annually for most of the past two decades before beginning to plateau.

With the wolves came the costs. In 2024, approximately 1,100 attacks on livestock were documented, killing or injuring roughly 4,300 animals --- 91 percent sheep and goats. Germany spent €23.4 million on livestock protection measures. The attacks concentrate in states where wolf-territory expansion outpaced fencing infrastructure. The damage falls disproportionately on small operations --- the farms least able to absorb it.

For 24 years, those farms had no regulatory recourse. The EU Habitats Directive classified the wolf as strictly protected. Rural communities absorbed the cost of expanding wolf populations while urban majorities, who bear none of it, supported continued protection.

The protection framework changed in December 2024. The Bern Convention Standing Committee voted to move the wolf from “strictly protected” to “protected.” The change entered force March 7, 2025. The EU followed, amending the Habitats Directive to reflect the new status. The strict protection that had governed wolf management across the continent for a generation was formally downgraded.

Germany moved within eleven months.

NABU, Germany’s largest nature conservation organization, called the law catastrophic. WWF Germany expressed deep concern. Conservation organizations across Europe pointed to the same evidence: the European Commission’s own in-depth analysis, completed before the downgrade proposal, found “no evidence that culling reduces livestock depredation.”

The Commission proposed the downgrade over the conclusion of its own assessment.

Brandenburg provides the counter-evidence the Commission’s analysis would predict.

Brandenburg has Germany’s densest wolf population. As farmers there adopted wolf fencing and guardian dogs, livestock kills declined --- 944 sheep and goats in the most recent year, down 337 from the prior year. The mechanism that works is not shooting wolves. It is infrastructure: the fences, the dogs, the daily management that makes predation harder and pushes wolf behavior toward wild prey.

This is what Gomringer teaches. This is what Eberler built. The farmers who spend their days at the boundary between agriculture and wildness know what works. They asked for it.

Parliament legislated something else. The translation failure is not malicious. It is structural. Livestock protection infrastructure is slow, bureaucratic, and invisible. It requires individual farm assessment, installation, maintenance. No politician stands beside a newly erected fence for a press photograph. A hunting law is fast, legible, and narratively complete: the problem was identified, the legislature acted, the wolves will be managed. That the management won’t solve the problem is a detail the political cycle can defer.

In late 2025, Nature Ecology & Evolution published the results of a survey of 10,807 Europeans across 23 countries with breeding large carnivore populations. The findings were remarkably consistent across rural and urban respondents, across national borders, across demographic categories.

Majorities support large carnivore recovery. Majorities oppose further population growth. Majorities oppose hunting.

Europeans want the wolves. They want the wolves to stop multiplying. They do not want anyone to kill them.

This is not confusion. It is a specific position about the endpoint of restoration: we accept what exists, we do not accept indefinite expansion. The wolves should be here. These wolves, this many, in this landscape. The question was never whether they belong. The question was always how many. And no one offered the infrastructure --- the fences, the dogs, the compensation schemes deployed at the speed the wolves required --- that would have answered that question without a gun.

The German wolf law is not a conservation defeat. It is the predictable democratic response to a restoration that succeeded ecologically without building the political architecture for the expansion it knew would produce. If you know wolves will colonize available territory, and you know rural communities will bear concentrated costs while urban majorities absorb dispersed benefits, you need political infrastructure that compensates the cost-bearers at the speed the expansion proceeds. That infrastructure was not built at scale. Where it was built --- Brandenburg --- the livestock kills fell. The evidence that protection works exists. The political will to fund it at the pace the wolves required did not.

In Scotland, conservation organizations are holding 42 community sessions across 21 locations, consulting 89,000 households, before deciding whether to reintroduce the Eurasian lynx. In Cornwall, the first licensed wild beavers were released in February 2026. Scotland is building the political infrastructure before the ecological reintroduction. Germany built the ecology first. The politics arrived 24 years later. What arrived was not the politics of coexistence. It was the politics of limit-setting.

The wolves came back. Then Germany voted on how many wolves Germany has. The farmers who spend their days managing the coexistence asked for fencing subsidies. Parliament gave them a hunting license. The science says that won’t fix the attacks either.

What rewilding called a defeat, the majority called a decision.

Sources

- Solen