The subsidy that has been available since 1 April for installing wolf-resistant grids for farmers of agricultural animals other than sheep and goats appears to be insufficient for rearing stables in Drenthe. The requirements that such a fence must meet make it much more expensive than a wolf-resistant grid used in sheep farming.
The available subsidy does not cover the costs at all and that is a reason for some horse breeders to put their foals indoors at night and not to install a wolf-resistant grid.
RTV Drenthe spoke with eight horse breeders and two of them have applied for a subsidy for a wolf-resistant grid. The other farms choose to put their foals in the stables at night.
Kees Kloet and his wife Irma Sieling run a breeding farm in Grolloo. They breed good horses for customers from all over the world from foal to about three years old. They also breed themselves and have a sports stable. They currently have 140 horses, including seven foals and young horses.
They are currently installing a five-wire wolf-resistant grid. The area they have to fence is 36 hectares. Irma Sieling has calculated that this requires 15 kilometers of cable. For the wolf-resistant grid, Kloet and Sieling use a so-called permanent cable that costs more than one euro per linear metre.
“If you only have steel wire and the horse gets into the fence, it is often fatal. And not with this cable,” says Kloet. “Then the horse is hardly damaged, while you do have the durability of steel cable; it lasts a very long time.”
Kloet does the construction himself and has already spent almost twice as much money for the material than he receives in subsidies. “We receive 12,000 euros in subsidy and that is quite a lot of money. But I have calculated that I have already reached 23,000 euros so far.”