In the village of Rém, sheep farmer Ferenc Gerstenmajer swears that, in one night, wolves slaughtered 10 to 15 members of his flock. “They bit through their necks,” says Gerstenmajer, clutching at his own, “and then ate their guts.” He finishes his statement by rubbing his stomach while a grimace of pain crosses his face. “A wolf kills more than it eats,” insists Gerstenmajer, explaining why he is positive that wolves — not dogs — did the killing. “A wolf only eats the guts.”
Unfortunately for Gerstenmajer, National Park officials don’t really believe his damage claims. If he had proof, he might be eligible for compensation for his lost livestock; by Gerstenmajer’s own estimate, each butchered lamb costs him Ft. 20,000. Options available for dealing with the wolves that he suspects have been preying on his sheep are limited, however. A protected species in Hungary, there is a Ft. 50,000 fine for shooting a wolf without the permission of environmental authorities.
The wolves in question are a small family of four who wandered over the border from Serbia, and now roam the agricultural Bácska region in Southern Hungary. With other wolves thought to live in the forests of the Carpathian mountains near Slovakia, the family is one of perhaps only two or three in the country, and has probably been in the area since 1995.
Earlier this year Kiskunság National Park refused to give Gemenc Kft, the state-owned company which overseas the local game population, permission to shoot the wolves. In a letter to the Park, Gemenc Kft alleged that the wolves were feeding on both local deer and livestock, a situation which caused a flurry of interest in the national media. News reports centered around the village of Rém, where the wolves have been known to scavenge at a local carcass dump, and alarmingly portrayed the villagers as rabidly anti-wolf. Even Bridgette Bardot got in on the act, phoning the Ministry for Environment from France, imploring Hungarians to spare the wolves.
Rém Mayor Zoltán Vetô claims that he remembers wolves in the area since his childhood in the 1960’s. “No one here is afraid of the wolves,” he asserts, “although the media would have liked them to be, in order to create a sensation.”
Interestingly, Vetô’s previous comments to the press colored many earlier stories about the wolves. The Hungarian media reported that he had warned local schoolchildren not to go into the woods alone, which helped to establish the image of the locals as paranoid country people eager to see the wolves done in. Vetô responds: “After the news, since I felt pressure on me from the Ministry and other sources, I asked the local hunters: ‘What should I do? Should I make an announcement?’ And then I announced something official, like: ‘Children must not go into the woods alone!’”
He goes on to tell a story, with obvious amusement, of a video shoot on the previous Friday, when a crew from MTV1’s Natura program, along with a contingent of national park officials, came to Rém. According to Vetô, they brought a tame wolf to the carcass dump in hopes that it would eat a dead lamb for the cameras. “It wouldn’t do it!” Vetô reports, laughing, “it even laid down on it!”
All the attention will benefit Rém, Vetô hopes. “We are planning a rooster cooking competition similar to Baja’s Halászlé Festival. Maybe all the media will come back to Rém!”
In the local kocsma, people seem to have even worked on preparing one-liners: “Much ado about nothing,” says bartender Sipka Sándhorné, while István Csóti adds: “We don’t dance with wolves.” Nobody we talk to wants to see the wolves killed; another man states that he has nothing against the wolves, but that they should be trapped and moved into a zoo.
The villagers’ jokes belie the seriousness of the issue. Gerstenmajer, his sheep, and the town have been caught up in part of the larger issue of wolf reintroduction and the worldwide trend towards “biodiversity”, a theory which promotes a comprehensive view of an environmental area and its users, animal and human. Biodiversity aims to insure the survival of as many plants and animals as possible, as well as reintroducing those that might have traditionally inhabited an ecosystem before humans arrived. The concept is not without controversy; people begin to object when officials start talking about resettling carnivores — wolves, cougars, and bears — in their backyards. North America is the major trial area for wolf reintroduction, where plans were met with staunch resistant from the Adirondacks to Alaska. The most well-known wolf reintroduction scheme started in Yellowstone National Park in 1995; a federal court recently ordered the project halted and the wolves removed.
Complaints about wolf reintroduction in Hungary echo those voiced in the United States: hunters worry about the wolves killing game animals; farmers about the loss of livestock; landowners about the infringement of property rights; and hikers and local people about personal safety. The Hungarian debate differs from the North American in a few important ways: the only wolves being reintroduced here are those that wander in naturally from other countries—no one is suggesting that the government deliberately bring in and reinsert wolves into the ecosystem; and the controversy here is much more subdued, perhaps due to the lack of a large national advocacy group agitating for the wolves (of which there are several in the United States).
Hungary’s policy is also affected by a paucity of cash and a lack of precedent. In the socialist days environmental policy was quite easy: if the government wanted an area protected or a policy implemented, it just did it. Ten years into the new era, things have changed. Now, the government must not only placate land owners and others using the land, but also gear their policies towards future EU ascension.
“If we can solve this problem we will learn a lot,” says Dr. Katalin Rodics, an environmental law specialist with the Authority for Nature Conservation.
In Hungary, a country with a long hunting tradition, animals which threaten game stocks are often viewed with hostility. Gemenc Kft, the hunter’s group which advised Mayor Vetô on what to say to the media, is the same one which also asked permission to kill the wolves. A state-owned company, Gemenc Kft represents local hunters and is responsible for overseeing the area’s game animals; it has become known throughout the country for the size of its red deer population.
In an area with more than 1,000 deer, it is hard to believe a few wolves could kill too many healthy deer, but Tíbor Csonka, the director of Gemenc, is adamant. He says that the area is a “gene reservation” for deer, and that the wolves endanger them. He knows of approximately three farmers who have made claims for compensation, but admits that he has no proof of any wolf killings of either deer or sheep. “If somebody sends me a letter of complaint, then I should take measures,” he asserts. “This (decision by the National Park) is ridiculous. We appealed it on the spot, because someone should pay for this damage.”
László Szemethy, a researcher from Gödöllô University who is coordinating a project to track the wolves with radio collars, is skeptical, citing only three definite cases he knows of in which a wolf killed a lamb in the area. Other killings, he says, could have been performed by representatives of the large population of feral dogs in the area. According to Szemethy, there are only three or four experts in the country who can accurately identify a wolf kill.
Stating that the wolves pose no threat to the deer, Szemethy says that they usually eat mice and other small game, and maybe larger carcasses they happen to find. He suggests another reason for the request to shoot the wolves: “Maybe somebody thought it would be nice to have a fur. The best way to do that is to say that they are dangerous.”
Emil Boros, a nature conservation inspector with Kiskunság National Park, reiterates Szemethy’s views. “We spoke to the local farmers, and the statements they made were contradictory, different from their claims. The whole situation seemed uncertain – blurred – and that’s why we rejected the plea to shoot them.”
Csonka isn’t satisfied with those explanations. “I’m fed up with the environmentalists. There haven’t been any wolves in the area for 100 years, so how can someone say that he is a wolf expert?”
The Hungarian Ministry for Environment knows that it faces a dilemma: protecting the wolves while placating people who might be negatively affected by them. European Union directives, with which Hungary is trying to comply, mandate that countries find ways to protect endangered animals, but don’t mandate what actions must be taken. In Spain, for example, the government gives two sheep dogs to farmers in areas with wolf populations.
Hungary took a step towards meeting these directives with the 1996 Hungarian Conservation Law. Taking an approach which has been bandied about in other countries in the region, such as Slovakia and Bulgaria, part of the law directs that landowners be compensated if their property is harmed by a protected species.
András Demeter, head of the Department of Nature Conservation within the Authority of Nature Conservation (yes, that’s the real name), says that “compensation is a complicated issue, involving financial and social matters.” Reimbursement doesn’t just involve wolves, but also otters and birds who feast in fish ponds. If it’s hard to figure out whether a wolf or a dog killed a lamb, how do you tally the number of fish an otter has eaten?
“That’s a big problem,” states Demeter. “It is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to quantify. That’s why compensation payments are extremely difficult to set up.” According to Demeter, in the years since the law has passed, he doesn’t know of one case in which compensation was actually paid. The whole thing is so muddled, that the Ministry for Environment will submit an additional decree to the Cabinet to vote on this year, which aims to clarify the process.
Examining the law, it’s easy to see how people might have a hard time making an adequate claim. A farmer who finds a dead lamb he suspects was killed by a wolf, for example, must notify the proper national park authority immediately. The park will then send out an expert to verify the claim. But even if verified, the landowner must jump through another hoop: the law stipulates that the property owner must have taken appropriate action to protect his property. In the Rém area, where sheep have traditionally been allowed to graze freely in the forest, this means building fences.
Demeter says that the government might scrap the compensation idea anyway, perhaps to be replaced by a form of direct subsidies, which will eliminate the need to verify damages.
Taking the vagaries of the law into account, it’s easy to understand Ferenc Gerstenmajer’s frustration. He doesn’t know why Kiskunság National Park hasn’t validated his claims. Still, Gerstenmajer says that he doesn’t dislike wolves. “Someone should take responsibility,” he states, shrugging resignedly.
What will happen to the wolves? Government environmental officials seem determined that the wolves will remain in the wild. Every expert interviewed for this article, when asked if the wolves would survive, answered with a version of “I hope so/I don’t know.” Szemethy, the researcher from Gödöllô University, says that he hopes the wolves will eventually grow to form a population of about a dozen. Of course, one or two hunters deciding to take matters into their own hands could settle the issue quickly. Ultimately, the fate of the wolves will reveal a lot about the direction and future success of conservation law in Hungary.
