A Dutch court on Wednesday rejected a plan to control the country’s growing wolf population by shooting the animals with paintball guns to scare them away from people.
A local court ruled that officials had not justified their decision to use the novel approach as a safe way to teach wolves to stay away from populated areas. He said that regional authorities had not sufficiently investigated other possible solutions.
Nature conservation society Fauna Protection opposed the plan, arguing it was an untested approach and it was unclear whether paintballs could seriously harm animals. The group was happy with the result. “The judge chose the wolf and not the humans,” the organization’s president, Harm Niesen, said in a statement.
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A wolf is seen in its enclosure at Germany’s Schorfheide Game Park.
(Patrick Pleul/Image Alliance via Getty Images)
Two centuries after wolves were hunted to extinction in the Netherlands, the animals officially returned to the country in 2019 when a pair of wolves crossing the border from Germany gave birth to three pups on Dutch soil.
Initially, the return of the protected species was heralded as a success, but as the wolf population has grown, so has the opposition to them. Farmers claim wolves have killed dozens of livestock animals, and earlier this month a video of a wolf chasing a cyclist went viral on social media.
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The eastern province of Gelderland issued a special waiver to regulations protecting the species to allow Hoge Veluwe National Park officials to shoot wolves with paintball guns.
The country is now home to four wolf packs, with a total population of around 20, although some German wolves also regularly cross the border.
