Wolves at the heart of the emergency agricultural bill presented on Wednesday, April 8, at the council of ministers. A chapter should allow breeders to defend themselves more easily.
The wolf is spreading across the territory. There were a little over a thousand at the end of last winter, in the Alps, the Pyrenees, Cantal, and now in Brittany. The canid has been back since 2022 in Finistère.
In the Monts d’Arrée, buffeted by the wind about thirty kilometers from the ocean, three wolves hide. Three solitary males who do not live together. Their return shakes an entire pasturing and breeding system. South of Brest, Hubert takes care of 250 dairy cows. In a green suit, he approaches one of them while she is calving. It was a calf like this one that he found dead in the early morning in June. “We saw that the trachea was cut,” he recalls. “We can conclude that it is a very strong choking, a very strong pinching, for example, of the animal’s mouth. Naturally, we thought directly of the wolf, because we know he has been in the area for three years,” he continues.
Last year alone, nearly 130 attacks were recorded in the department. “It’s true that today, shooting is a solution,” admits Hubert. “So we can probably tolerate a few animals wandering around, because we’re not necessarily in favor of the extinction of the species, but the proliferation worries us greatly,” he adds. “The real risk of the wolf is putting animals on the table because we’re not going to collect corpses, we’re not going to put up 1.40 m fences over 40 km of fencing, it’s not realistic,” laments the breeder.
Dozens of volunteers are trained to help breeders. This large predator travels an average of 50 km per day. If it leaves the south of Monts d’Arrée at dawn, it can reach Marie Roland’s farm north of Finistère in a few hours. She has decided to protect her animals with dogs. “I have a herd of 80 followed sheep and so I have the three dogs that accompany the sheep,” explains the farmer who has never been worried about the wolf. “I never think about the attacks, in fact, because I tell myself that they are there and they are doing the job,” she asserts.
Nathalie, 58, does not visit the sheep by chance. In addition to dogs, it is possible to have a human presence near herds, as taught by the FERUS association. “So my principle is that we should not kill wild animals, because in fact the man kills a lot of animals. By principle, as soon as that annoys us, we kill them and so I think FERUS responds to that,” explains Nathalie.
Around thirty nature enthusiasts of all ages are ready to spend one, two, three nights in the fields. Pascal, a former special education teacher, keeps an eye on the animals. “I think it’s a good consensus. We know we are going to help a breeder and we are going to protect the wolf, I believe it’s royal, we can’t do much better.”
In addition to this visit, they also attended classes over a weekend. “Initially, the Pastoraloup program is mainly developed in the Alps and we operate with missions that are anticipated, that are organized,” explains Fanny Mallet, an employee of the FERUS association who coordinates the association’s field actions. “Here in Brittany, we operate more on an emergency system, that’s why we only recruit local volunteers, it’s only Bretons here, for a certain reactivity and that’s it, we will temporarily relieve the breeder facing the stress he may experience,” she continues.
Proof of the need for this training, the next night, the wolf attacked again in another farm. Eight sheep were killed, so the volunteers pitched their tents for a few days to watch over the rest of the herd.
