With the steady return of wolves to an ever-widening territory, the illegal practice of poaching the protected species – whether by shooting, poisoning or trapping – seems to be intensifying.
Several cases in recent years have been given media coverage and provide insight into the phenomenon. In June 2023, three people were indicted for poisoning a wolf in Crupies, in the Drôme region. Among them was the local contact person for the wolf network in the French Office for Biodiversity (Office français de la biodiversité, OFB), who admitted to having infiltrated the agency to obtain information on wolf packs.
A year earlier, two wolves were found poisoned to death in the Vanoise National Park and in 2021, a she-wolf was found hanged in front of a town hall in a Champsaur village, located in the Hautes-Alpes department. That same year, the department's president, Jean-Marie Bernard (Les Républicains) was fined for presenting a wolf's tail to the outgoing préfète at her farewell ceremony.
While there are no official estimates of the scale of poaching, which is essentially hidden, there are several indications that the act is on the increase. According to a network of naturalists, who are using camera traps to closely monitor 36 wolf packs in the south-east of France, more than a quarter of them were reported to have been hunted down in 2023: abnormal disappearances, and wolves photographed with amputated legs or a snare around their neck. "We've seen a steady increase in these acts over the last few years," said Roger Mathieu, head of the France Nature Environnement Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes (FNE AURA).
It's a concern echoed by a member of the OFB wolf network (who wishes to remain anonymous), who for the past three years has been monitoring four packs in the Vercors region. "Up to this year, they were generally stable. In February, we saw the disappearance of a dominant male, for no reason, and then a she-wolf was found with a snare around her head. In spring, the third pack was eradicated," he added.
In the Haut-Var, another wolf tracker said: "Poaching has been systematic from 2018, when a pack settled in, even though there are no livestock here. This year, only one wolf out of eleven remains."
It's difficult to assess the incidences of poaching on the wolf population. Wolf corpses that are found are officially counted as part of the 19% of wolves legally slaughtered each year: six in 2021, seven in 2022, and nine in 2023. But most poached wolves disappear in the wild – losses that are not taken into account in the management policies for the protected species. "There is some invisible poaching, but we can't see its impact on population dynamics, which overall, remains on the increase," said Jean-Paul Célet, the principal coordinator and the national liaison officer responsible for the wolf. However, this comes with a sharp rise in recent years of natural and accidental mortality. According to a publication by the OFB, this has risen from 26% before 2014 to 42% between 2014 and 2019, almost at the threshold beyond which the population risks declining.
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