From 60 to 3000 Wolves: Protection Efforts Pay Off!

Through conservation efforts and political action, Poland has seen its population of wolves grow massively, and today, the predator is under governmental protection to restore its presence in the country for good.

“Activists and wildlife biologists took advantage of this opportunity and, through skillful strategic activities oriented at undermining old institutions and creating new ones, managed to induce the government to implement a new policy paradigm,” say Krzysztof Niedzialkowski and Renata Putkowska-Smoter of the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences.

In the early 1970s, the total population dropped to 60 individuals. The wolf went from game animal to protected species gradually, and that change started at the end of the 1980s. In 1995, wolf protection became mandatory across the nation. By 1998, the wolf was no longer a game animal, much to the delight of conservationists. Today, there are 3,000 wolves in Poland. The population is monitored, among other things, through genetics, and GPS devices. Since 2000, the wolf population has increased by 164%. Henryk Okarma, former director of the Institute of Nature Conservation in Krakow, a unit of the Polish Academy of Sciences, sums it up quite well: “Society easily accepts a story like this: we exterminated the wolf, and now we are restoring it.”