Farmers Howling Over Protected Wolves

Along the ice-crusted shores of the Glomma River, where Arctic winds blast the scenery with hoarfrost and winter begrudges the hardy inhabitants mere glimpses of daylight, two endangered species are locked in a bloody battle for survival: the gray wolf and the Norwegian farmer.

In the three years since a wolf pair strayed from Sweden into this sparsely populated ranching valley, conservationists have clashed with the rare rural holdouts about whether the fabled predators should be allowed to return at the expense of livestock after nearly a century of absence.

Karl Sigurd Hole’s family has farmed here since 1912. That was about the time wolves disappeared from the region, the victims of aggressive hunting in an era when protecting family and flock was of the utmost importance and notions such as biodiversity were confined to idealists in the big cities.

“There’s really no way to compromise with wolves and sheep. They can’t exist together,” the 49-year-old farmer says. “You either have to kill the wolves or move them, and there isn’t really enough wilderness left in Norway where they could be moved.”

Hole has been keeping his 130-odd sheep penned on his lowland property for the last two years after losing 30 head to wolves the preceding winter. But sheep were meant to graze and roam freely, he argues, complaining that the size of his lambs and the taste of their meat are suffering from confinement.

Clashes between farmers and environmentalists have gained intensity in North America as well in recent years, as resettlement programs have attempted to replenish wolves, lynxes and wolverines in national parks and forests.

But in this remote valley in eastern Norway, the wolves returned without the intervention of humans. A pair of alpha, or dominant, wolves simply moved in from neighboring Sweden in 1997 and have produced three litters of pups to raise their numbers to about 18, says biologist Petter Wabbaken, who has been tracking the wolves.

The natural recovery of the wolf population was celebrated by most Norwegians, who harbor a healthy respect for the environment despite their country’s continued tolerance of a small whaling industry. But the unexpected reappearance coincided with another uphill effort of conservation: the government’s increasingly costly subsidies to encourage at least a token agrarian population.

While farmers question the need for wolves in Norway after a prosperous century without them, some in Oslo ask what this oil-rich country gains from an artificially propped-up agricultural sector when it is among the world’s wealthiest nations and must import most foods because of its forbidding climate.

Oslo’s Dagens Naeringsliv, the country’s main business daily newspaper, reports that Norwegian farmers produce $78 million worth of meat each year, while receiving $200 million in government support. Keeping some active farms is a priority for the government, which aims to prevent a wholesale migration of its rural population to its handful of big cities, journalist Bjoern Olav Nordahl says.

That aim clashes, however, with the government’s commitment to the Bern Convention on Biodiversity, which obliges signatory states to protect endangered species. Though the wolf has been declared an “extremely endangered” animal throughout Scandinavia for decades and a special protection regime was enacted in Norway in 1981, Environment Minister Guro Fjellanger issued an order in March to kill the breeding pair stalking this valley. Farmers had filed claims for government compensation for hundreds of sheep missing at the end of the 1998 grazing season.

Norway’s branch of the World Wildlife Fund and other conservation groups challenged the edict and won a court decision overturning it in December. The Environment Ministry is pushing legislation to have the status of the wolves reduced to simply “endangered,” allowing selective kill orders when the predators threaten livestock.

“We think the farmers could do more to protect their sheep, like guarding them the way shepherds do in other countries,” says Line Stabell of the World Wildlife Fund in Oslo. “The practice now is just to leave them alone in the highlands from May or June until they come home again in August.”

Stabell and other conservationists contend that many of the 30,000 sheep that farmers reported missing last year died of exposure during unexpected cold snaps or fell prey to bears, lynxes, wolverines or accidents, rather than to the lone alpha pair and their offspring.

Farmers say it is hard enough to make ends meet in the frigid livestock-raising areas of Norway, and that having to hire shepherds at this country’s high wage levels would quickly put them out of business.

“We live in a different world from the sheep farmers in places like Romania or Greece, where they use children who go barefoot and sleep with the flocks for the whole summer,” notes Anne Ulvik, who says she lost 20 sheep to predators last year and 43 the previous grazing season. “I can say for sure that we would never treat employees like that; in fact, we would be punished if we did.”

Fencing the grazing areas also is unrealistic, Ulvik says. Like the rest of the 30 farming families around Stor Elvdal county in the central Hedmark region, Ulvik turns her livestock out onto public land in the spring and leaves the animals to roam over 40,000 acres.

“We don’t have so much woodland left, so we have to use it for other purposes as well as grazing,” says Ulvik, who, along with her husband and five children, tends a small hydroelectric power plant, a lumber mill and a fish farm on the family land--as well as 138 sheep. “But with the wolves there now, people are afraid to walk in the woods. I no longer go out by myself to pick berries. The wolves are not just taking our sheep, they are robbing us of our quality of life.”

Stor Elvdal’s dilemma is “a classic urban-versus-rural conflict,” says Havard Haug, a natural resources management specialist for the region. But the debate in Norway is particularly strained, he says, because there are no open spaces to which the wolves could be transplanted without endangering the reindeer herds of the north or the urban centers along the southern and western coastlines.

Conservationists accuse the farmers of exaggerating their losses to get more compensation from the government, which reimburses owners for lost animals at prices often higher than the meat would command at market.

Wabbaken, the biologist, who has spent more than 20 years researching wolves and their behavior, attributes the hostile response of local sheep farmers to the suddenness with which their security has been shaken.

“Locally, it’s a dramatic increase, to go from six to 18 wolves in two years,” he says. “For so long, there was such a low population of carnivores that the farming methods developed took no account of the threat.”

He has been pressing the government to fund research into preventive measures against wolf attacks on livestock, which might allow predator and prey alike to survive in this region considered “wolf country” until the end of the 1800s. But the lack of support for alternatives has stiffened the farmers’ resolve to see the wolves eradicated, even if they have to take the law into their own hands.

Hole, a soft-spoken family man who taught junior high school until two years ago, says he knows what to do if he spots a wolf around his farm. He keeps a rifle by his bedside and a shovel in the garage, ready to defend his flock even at the risk of a six-year jail term if he were found to have shot an extremely endangered species.

“I intend to stay and fight. I’m not giving up,” says the third-generation farmer, who hopes his 19-year-old son will one day take over the farm. “Norway needs farms and its own food supply, if only for security reasons. What we don’t need is wolves.”

Williams was recently on assignment in Norway.