French farmers frustrated with the government’s failure to control the local wolf population trucked hundreds of sheep to the western city of Lyon on Monday to march in protest.

Farmers claim to be experiencing increasing wolf attacks on their flocks, and want the government to grant them permission to shoot wolves that enter their land on sight.

Although wolves were hunted to extinction in France in the 1930’s, a breeding pair is believed to have crossed the Alps in the early 1990s, and presently there are an estimated 360 packs of wolves roaming France.

Wolf cull

The French government has introduced a five year plan to cull a small number of wolves every year but farmers are unhappy with this measure and do not believe that it will be enough to curb the attacks.

“Enough with the wolf … at some point you have to choose between farmers and the wolf,” said the president of the National Sheep Federation in France Michele Boudion.

Boudion went on to estimate that the increased number of wolves cost livestock producers €26m every year compared with €1.5m in 2004.

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