I wrote about this topic in Finnish in mid-December. Now I have come to the point where I want to share this writing to my non-finnish readers, since I might help to understand the current situation in Finnish wolf issue.
The conversation about wolves has heated up again. Against each other are the safety of humans and right to live without constant fear and the protection of wolves.
Both have their supporters and adversaries. Is one of these more important than other?
I don't believe so.
These to things should be combined in a way that would satisfy majority on people. There won't be a day when everyone accepts wolves existence nor there will be a day when all will accept the measures needed to affect wolf behavior and their amount. Gladly, most of the people how ever will accept a genuine compromise where human safety is taken in to account as well as preserving the wolf population in our country.
What would this kind of compromise require then?
Depending of who you ask, current situation is either favoring humans or wolves. On my own point of view, the scale is tipped more towards wolves and their protection. To balance the scale, some individuals from the wolf population needs to be removed. These are the individuals that are too bold and come to settlement and yards of humans after easy prey or in the need of controlling their territory by killing dogs even in front of humans.
Because wolf is so called top-predator that doesn't have natural enemies in their "natural" habitat outside of their own species, it is natural for wolf not to fear humans if it doesn't have any negative experiences of humans or it hasn't learned this from it's parents. For the preservation of the wolf population it would be best for wolves and humans alike to "remind" wolves that a human is a predator hunting them, thus leading wolves to avoid contact with humans. This "lesson" is the reason why people assume that wolves are naturally shy of people and like to live in the wilderness because of this. This is assumption we humans have made out of wolves need to stay alive and thus staying further away from humans.
Hopefully the new wolf management plan can keep it's planned licenced hunt and the more easier (bureaucratically lighter) protection hunts after it has gone through it's comment round. These two methods are unfortunately necessary at first since wolves have already learned to benefit from humans and have started to consider human presence as irrelevant as the wind rustling through leaves of a tree. The preventive methods aren't effective any more to have an impact for wolves behavior and their distrust for humans. The fencing does protect the animals, but the problem will just move to the unprotected pasture of another area end the core issue isn't solved at all.
Due being a predator, wolf has to learn quickly and after whole population has been "taught" to avoid people again the amount of problem individuals will drop and those problematic individuals that do occur are most likely injured or otherwise sick and removing them wouldn't endanger the long therm survival of wolf population.
In the States a observation has been made that wolves learn to avoid airplanes from where they have been gunned by going to hide inside a forest. I don't doubt a moment that our wolves wouldn't be able to connect human presence and for example barking of the dogs with the hunting and the killing of a pack member if the hunt is done properly. In this there is a chance to failure, since animals tend to connect new things in their environment to the act of hunting. In this case to hide human scent is a mistake since the idea is to give wolves a clear connection between humans and their scent to the act of hunting itself. Thus when going to hunt wolves it would be wisest to make oneself smell as much of a human as possible unlike usually when the human scent is to be hidden or removed.
When the wolf population has learned that humans are a hazard the management can be focused on keeping the population healthy and viable. This requires that we learn from our past and will not let the situation to return back to the current one. The licence hunt where 1-2 individuals from a pack is removed after it has had a successful breeding, would keep up the shyness of wolves thus eliminating the need for poaching and it's acceptance completely I hope.
The future population management could be based on information from DNA as it is currently in Sweden. Even though wolf is a wild animal, to ensure well-being of both wolves and humans alike, we need to control their numbers and using DNA we can make the population estimate more reliably than today, since the current number of wolves isn't clear without knowledge of territorial boundaries and relatedness of individuals. It is also vital to get a better picture of the packs living in the border area between Finland and Russia to help prevent the inbreeding of wolf population. If the border area is filled with packs, the immigrating individuals can't go safely through them and bring new blood to our wolf population.
From this year onward, we hopefully can balance the scale between protection and humans. It is possible though that momentarily the scale will tip to favor humans, but it should not be allowed to stay in this position and it should be actively restored to it's balanced state.
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