Early yesterday morning, a wolf was seen crawling through a wolf-resistant grid in a meadow in Wapse. As far as we know, this is the first time in our province that an eyewitness has seen this. It concerns a grid around the land of Ynze Oenema, his cousin Anne is the eyewitness.
According to Ynze Oenema, the appraiser labeled the grid as wolf-resistant. A year ago, the Oenema family’s fence was part of a visit by Minister Christianne van der Wal for Nitrogen and Nature; it was an example of what a wolf-resistant grid should look like.
Yesterday morning, Anne Oenema shone his headlights over the land. “I saw the eyes of sheep light up. I thought: this isn’t right. At first I didn’t see the wolf. But later I saw the wolf walking in the light of the headlights. He was looking at me from 50 meters away. I was astounded. You don’t expect something like that. I put him in the light and that’s why he ran off,” says Anne Oenema.
Oenema saw that the wolf then spent some time in a field with potatoes and witnessed that the wolf then passed through a wolf-resistant grid. “The young wolf pressed the wire up with its neck between the lowest wire and the next lowest wire. The animal had thick fur around its neck.”
According to Ynze Oenema, the owner of the sheep, there was almost 6 kilovolts of voltage on the six-wire grid. “It’s an electric fence. It won’t kill you if you bump into it,” adds 72-year-old Anne Oenema.
Ten sheep were injured in the attack and one sheep did not survive. “Two sheep had damage to the trachea and one had a broken buttocks. Another one is due to lamb in six weeks, but had a bite on the brain. About four sheep are in serious condition, but the rest will survive. They have penicillin received,” says Anne Oenema.
BIJ12 confirms the damage report to RTV Drenthe, but cannot yet make any statements about the status of the fence.
It is the third time that a wolf crawled through Ynze Oenema’s wolf-resistant grid. “On September 30 last year, a sheep was put to sleep after a throat bite.” DNA research shows that it was the mother wolf of the pack in the Drents-Friese Wold. On November 11 last year, a wolf killed an Oenema sheep and injured two. It is still unknown which wolf this was.
BIJ12 confirms that the grid was placed according to the standard during the previous attacks. In the November attack, BIJ12 notes that the grid was not intact because a sheep broke out.
Today the province of Gelderland is discussing possible measures against the wolf. The province wants to keep the number of wolves at the current eighty.
The province also wants to be able to intervene if a wolf makes two attacks on well-protected livestock within a week. The province then wants to make culling possible within a radius of one kilometer, without prior DNA testing.