The Spanish farmers who cried wolf

WHO’S afraid of the big bad wolf? Just about everybody, it seems.

This public enemy number one is often harassed and persecuted. The last one recorded here was killed in Carlow in 1786.

The Irish name for the animal tells it all; “mac tíre” translates roughly as “the outcast son of the countryside”.

But, does the world’s largest dog really deserve its terrible reputation?

Unprovoked attacks on humans by non-rabid wolves are said to have occurred in Europe from ancient times up to the early 20th Century. An alleged attack on a French shepherd in 2001 is the only recent report; wolves give us a wide berth nowadays. They do kill farm animals, however. Sheep are especially vulnerable and it’s not surprising that wolves and farmers make unhappy bed-fellows. Traps, poisoned-bait and bullets have driven all large carnivores to the verge of extinction.

The Spanish government pays about €1.5 million each year to farmers who claim that livestock has been lost to wolves. However dogs, which are much more numerous, also attack sheep. Jorge Echegaray and Carles Vilà of the Donana Biological Station in Seville wondered if wolves were being blamed for the misdeeds of delinquent family pets and off-duty sheep-dogs. To find out, they embarked on an in-depth study of the problem. Jorge outlined their results on RTÉ’s Mooney Show last week.

The scientists began by collecting statistics. During 2003 and 2004, 432 farm animals were attacked in the Basque country. In almost all cases, wolves were blamed. Identifying the killers of dead animals requires forensic skills worthy of Sherlock Homes. In the film Jaws, a rogue great white shark was identified from the ring of tooth-marks it left on the body of a victim; each species has its own unique bite radius.

With wolves, however, it’s not that simple. A wolf’s bite resembles that of a large dog, so examining teeth marks isn’t much help. Nor is there usually time to collect evidence. The remote areas of Spain have large populations of hungry vultures; carcasses are soon stripped to the bone.

The remains of wolf victims end up in dung, the outward appearance of which yields little useful information; all clues to the identity of victims are hidden within.

Echegaray and Vilà, however, came up with a novel way to unlock the secrets of the scats. Their surveys in areas of the Basque country where wolf attacks were allegedly taking place, yielded 136 faecal samples. These were taken to the laboratory and mitochondrial DNA extracted from them. Analysis of the DNA enabled both predator and prey species to be identified from 86 of the samples. Fifty-three had come from dogs, 31 were from wolves and two belonged to foxes. The wolf samples contained mostly roe deer remains but wild boars hares and badgers had also been eaten. Only one wolf sample, however, had traces of sheep.

With the dog droppings, it was a different story. Domestic animals accounted for 54% of their food items. Ominously, 14 samples contained sheep tissue. Cattle or horse traces were found in seven of the dog samples. However, neither wolves nor dogs normally attack creatures as large as these, so it’s thought that the victims were already dead when encountered.

With more dogs in the countryside than wolves, it’s hardly surprising that so many canine droppings were found. Nor does the presence of sheep remains in faeces necessarily mean that the eater had killed the prey; a sheep may have been dead when the wolf or dog found it. The possibility that some dogs had been given sheep bones by their owners can’t be ruled out. However, even with these caveats, the results seem to show that dogs, and not wolves, are largely to blame for the deaths of livestock in Spain.

The research raises thorny political questions. Do farmers too readily assume that a wolf is responsible for the death of a sheep? Shepherds might be tempted to blame wolves even though they know that dogs are the culprits. Are wolves being bad-mouthed so that the compensation scheme can be milked?