The Spanish parliament has voted through a measure that will in effect lift the hunting ban on wolves that was imposed in 2021.
A coalition led by the conservative People’s party, with the support of the far-right Vox party and Basque and Catalan nationalists, added an amendment to a law aimed at reducing Spain’s estimated 1.2bn kilos of food waste.
The amendment says that wolves create food waste in the form of 14m kilos of meat in the remains of the 14,000 sheep and cattle they allegedly kill each year. In Castilla y León, the region with the largest wolf population, farmers’ organisations claim that in 2024 wolves killed about 6,000 head of livestock.
But critics have said there is no scientific basis for these figures. “Today the parliament has presided over what is a dark day for nature conservation in Spain, using an underhand method and without any scientific justification to leave wolves unprotected,” Juan Carlos del Olmo, general secretary of the WWF in Spain, said after the vote.
The WWF believes that a decision it said is “based on political opportunism” opens the way for the indiscriminate slaughter of wolves and undermines the progress made on coexistence between farming and wildlife.
“This is profoundly irresponsible,” said a source at Spain’s ministry for ecological transition. “The conflict between wildlife and humans is nothing new and the only policy that benefits everyone must be based on coexistence.”
The source said the vote was based on a denial of the facts and of science. “Taking the wolf off the list of protected species in this way doesn’t help anyone.”
Figures released this week showed that the population explosion of wolf packs predicted by the pro-hunting lobby has not materialised. Numbers have remained stable in the north-west, home to a majority of Spain’s estimated 2,500 wolves, an area where they have enjoyed protection only since 2021.
Isidre Gavín i Valls of the Catalan nationalist party Together for Catalonia, which supported the amendment, said the party was opposed to the killing of even one wolf, but said that until now “it’s the shepherds who lack protection”.
Last December the EU reduced the protected status of wolves from “strictly protected” to “protected” in a policy championed by the EU Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, after a wolf killed her family’s pet pony.
