Wolf 2 — Commission president 0, after EU court nixes wolf hunting

Commission President von der Leyen, meanwhile, believes EU law must be made more flexible on the issue of wolf hunting. “[While] the comeback of wolves is good news for biodiversity in Europe,” she said last December, “the concentration of wolf packs in some European regions has become a real danger, especially for livestock.”

At the time, von der Leyen proposed that the status of wolves be downgraded from “strictly protected” to “protected” to make it easier for national authorities to grant kill orders against animals that threatened farm livestock.

Von der Leyen’s feelings about wolves may have been steeled by an incident two years ago in which a wolf killed her beloved pony Dolly in Lower Saxony, an event she said had “horribly distressed” her family. Easing the culling of wolves is also a long-standing demand of von der Leyen’s political family, the center-right European People’s Party.

The Commission president has personally kept track of talks on the status downgrade file in the past few months, but it’s unclear whether she can convince a majority of EU governments to back her idea. While agriculture ministers in member countries seem broadly in favor of the proposal, EU environment ministers have been pushing back.

Member countries are due to decide by the end of the year, but if court rulings sympathetic to wolves keep rolling in, von der Leyen may find it impossible to get her proposal through.

The EU’s top court reiterated on Monday that wolves can be managed but not hunted, even in a specific region, if the nationwide conservation status of the species is unfavorable. “The purpose of those measures must be to maintain or restore the species concerned [to] a favorable conservation status,” the judges said.

“Where those measures include hunting rules, they are intended to restrict hunting, not to extend it … if it proves necessary, hunting may, therefore, even be prohibited.”

Christian Pichler, a conservationist with WWF Austria, said “politicians must finally move away from their populist bogus solutions and provide comprehensive support for domestic farmers in protecting livestock.”