Wilderness: still on the wolf in Valbormida

Italian Wilderness Association, still on the wolf in Valbormida.

By now the presence of the wolf in Val Bormida can be considered stable, and this is demonstrated by the increasingly frequent reports of specimens sighted, many of which in the vicinity of the village and even within them (such as the recent cases of Roccavignale). Their arrival from Piedmont (or from France, where repopulation probably began) had been widely foreseen by the undersigned: there are press releases and press articles published in recent decades to show that this would have ended. Today "monitoring" its presence will be of little use, if not to establish that the wolves will soon be too many and it will be necessary to decide how to intervene to reduce their number.

Certainly it will be used by those who have obtained thousands of euros in public contributions to do so and to study the equally obsolete predatory and social activities (we know everything about wolves): the usual useless expenses that are made in our country (useless, at least for the Whole society)! Because the real problem, if anything, is the behavior of these "strange" wolves who have so much confidence with man.

Another fundamental problem, however, is also the fact that this population of wolves of the clearly Central European phenotype (and let's hope that there are also specimens from other sources, as some photos and footage of the past clearly made us deduce) goes to pollute the original one and for a long time preserved despite the massacres of the distant past, of the Apennines, better known as the southern subspecies (Canis lupus italicus), of which even those who deal with the wolf are always keen to specify its important biodiversity and therefore to preserve its genetic integrity. But it will be possible to preserve the biodiversity of the Italic wolf, with this terrible invasion of "any wolf as long as there is a wolf" which comes from the west and which is increasingly expanding towards the east, both along the Alpine chain and towards that Apennine? This is, at least for us naturalists, the real problem.

A third problem, equally serious, is represented by predations on domestic animals (including dogs), which surely no one will want to pay when they reach astronomical figures (as in Tuscany); and then there is that always denied, but widely conceivable, of the risk of aggression to man; and the confidence these wolves are showing towards man makes us understand that the risk must at least be hypothesized, also on the basis of facts that have already occurred elsewhere, not to mention the past, even if stubbornly denied in principle.
These are the things that should be monitored: everything else brings only water (euphemism, of course) to those who are monitoring this new wolf population.
And soon the same politics that has taken steps to ride the Life Projects business (European money!) Will soon have to contend with people's protests for this uncomfortable (and, naturalistically speaking - but only for those who are not hypocritical -, inappropriate) presence.

Frank Zunino
Secretary General of the Italian Wilderness Association

(March 6, 2015)