The latest news found. It was the first year in which no trace, traces or excrement that witnessed the presence of a species that was already in its historical minimum was detected. In July 2023, the regional scope, certified the absence of “indication of the presence of wolf in Andalusia” and in 2024 the Board formalized its extinction before the Flora and Fauna Committees and the Biodiversity Andalusian. However, a year later, the government of Juan Manuel Moreno has not launched the reintroduction program to which it has been forced by having declared that species extinct. A requirement that has been claiming conservation and environmental groups for decades and the one that has just been added the Andalusian PSOE, but which has the frontal opposition of farmers and hunters, whose political influence when making decisions is decisive in this community.
“The population of Lobos de Sierra Morena is the only one in Europe that has disappeared and it is time to start working in its recovery,” says Luis Suarez, of WWF, who warns that the Board is bound by law to the recovery of extinct species. An obligation that the Andalusian socialists have just remembered this week in the regional Parliament where they have urged the Ministry of Environment to officially declare the wolf as an extinct species in the community, an indispensable step to adopt recovery programs. “The PP refuses to recognize the extinction, because accepting it would imply that it has made poor management and face the hypothetical pressure of sectors such as the livestock and the hunting,” says the deputy of the PSOE-A, Antonio Ruiz.
The Minister of Sustainability and Environment, Catalina García, replied that after the realization of a report in 2023 to evaluate the demographic and population status of the subspecies of the wolf in the community, it was confirmed that the canid “is extinguished in a wild state in Andalusia and the Sierra Morena team, from 2015 ″, conclusions that were communicated to the two mandatory public participation bodies: The Flora and Fauna Committee, in May 2024, and the Andalusian Biodiversity Council, in November of the same year. the Board that they will not initiate their reintroduction. “” It is not an issue that is a priority for this government, “he says.
Ecologists attract attention to how the different initiatives to stop the eradication of the wolf adopted by the regional administration in recent years have been declining. “Already with the socialist government, Life projects were launched, similar to those of the Lynx, to disseminate the benefits of the wolf in the municipalities where there could be a greater presence, but, meanwhile, it was extinguished, something that was a contradiction,” recalls Juan Clavero, historical activist of Ecologists in Action. “The PSOE must have declared the wolf as a species in danger of extinction, but did not and with the PP the situation has worsened more,” emphasizes Felipe Román, biologist and president of the In addition to the Life project, in 2018 the Board launched a conservation plan, but in 2021 the Andalusian Executive, with Moreno in front, voted against granting a special protection regime and adhered to the petition of other communities where there is the presence of the wolf to ask Europe to decrease its protection.
Absence of consensus
“We need the wolf,” Román emphasizes. Conservationists defend the need for their recovery in the community as an essential element to return the balance in an ecosystem in which the absence of predators has increased the number of deer or wild boars. They also attract attention to the sanitary role of this predator for the control of diseases that could be transmitted to cattle.
The attitude of conservationists is not naif and they are aware that this species is a threat when it attacks cattle and recognizes that therefore they demand that any reintroduction program be carried out guaranteeing a “general consensus”. “Reintroduction is of no use, if there is not a social, political and economic framework that allows it before,” says Roldan. Something that, for the moment, does not seem to be possible due to the frontal opposition of the livestock sector and, in a less belligerent way, of the hunters. “I only saw my father cry when the wolves killed his sheep one day and one no,” explains Agustín González, responsible for extensive livestock of agri -food cooperatives, an organization that, together with COAG and ASAJA, signed in 2024 a document in which in one of its points they requested the exit of this canid of the farmers deny not only that the wolf is a threatened species, They defend their hunt, but the arguments of environmentalists. “The wolf does not kill to eat, kill for killing and hopefully he made natural selection and eaten the sick animals, but first he prefers to hunt a sheep than a wild boar,” says González.
A reflection shared by Antonio Punzano, head of livestock of Coag, who warns that the reappearance of the wolf in Andalusia would cause the extinction of extensive livestock. “It would disappear, it is the weakest animal of the chain and in the situation where extensive livestock is, without generational relay, reintroducing to the wolf is an unassumable risk.”
Natural recovery
From the Andalusian federation of hunting they are not so combative, but they do not defend the reintroduction of the wolf. “Compared to other populations from the rest of Europe, the expansion rate in the Peninsula is minimal,” says Isabel Salado, a researcher at the Doñana Biological Station and has participated in a study on the genome of the Iberian wolf.
Something that seems complicated after that is why conservationists demand, it is important to promote programs that, as in the case of the lynx, allow to recover a species in extinction.
An initiative that could be developed thanks to the one approved by the Ministry of Ecological Transition in 2022, endowed with funds for the communities that want to develop it, but from which, as Clavero emphasizes, “the Board has disregarded.” In return, Roldán claims the PSOE. “The wolf has the right to exist and the PSOE should be consistent and present the unconstitutional resource to the food waste law and catalog it from the government as a vulnerable species, because the regime it has in Andalusia is insufficient,” warns the biologist on the inclusion of the wolf in the Suarez goes one step Recover the population of Wolf.
