Monday, January 17, 2011

How many Swedes does it take to kill a wolf?

337 of them apparantly. I get the idea that Red Riding Hood would be in big trouble in Sweden according to this report on Euractive.
The European Commission is preparing an infringement procedure against Sweden, after it allowed a cull of 20 wolves by 6,747 hunters on Saturday
What we have hear of cousre is another example of Brussels interfering with something that should be a local issue. That is hunting wolves in outback Sweden
Wolves had been all but extinct in Sweden until the 1990s, when a very small number were re-introduced to the country's north. Their offspring are now thought to number around 250. As a result of their limited genetic pool, they are very in-bred.

It appears that the hunters are not in any way trying to exterminate the wolf in Sweden, and with that hit rate they would be hard pushed, but they are trying to control (not decimate please note) the numbers of an animal, artificially reintroduced.

So we now have a large number of animal lovers (living mostly in the urban south), telling the people who live and work in the wild North what they should and shouldn't be doing. That would be bad enough if the row was kept in Sweden, but would work within their democracy. Now however we have the whiole apparatus of the EU coming down on them.

Sledgehammer meet nut.


5 comments:

Anonymous said...

only 5 wolves short of decimation !

PJH said...

"but they are trying to control (not decimate please note)"

As Anon pointed out they only need to kill 25 to result in decimation.

(Though I'm sure the wolves didn't draw lots to decide which 1-in-10 of them would be the one killed.)

Gawain Towler said...

This is true, but that would mean they would need another 1685 hunters to manage it

PJH said...

Or another 1/4 of a day...

Gawain Towler said...

Hmmm, there again another interesting statistic from this piece is that there are 560,000 Mosse hunters in Sweden, if we accept the 6% of the population as an acccurate figure.....

And got to love the sub headline,
"Moose hunters outraged"

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