The latter also thinks Cees van Kempen, who says he has had ‘the necessary shit’ last week because he would talk about his nature film Wolf in Ruinen on Sunday. “And that touches you. Not only as a person, but also in my livelihood,” he says. The filmmaker from Brabant was stunned by the threats. “But I also think it is typical of today’s society. Tension arises everywhere where the wolf appears. You saw that twenty years ago in East Germany, but the tension is gone there. Later also in Central Germany, but they have learned to live with it there too. And now the same thing is happening here, only on a more intense level,” he says.
Van Kempen believes that the arrival of the wolf could have been better anticipated in our country. “Drivers are screaming bloody murder because the wolves are suddenly there, but they should have known that for a long time. When things did not go well with the wolf forty years ago, it was decided to protect vulnerable nature across borders. As a result, the wolf took back ground.” It was already obvious in 2017 that the wolf would come to the Netherlands, he says. “Then I broke my piggy bank to make a film of it. It is better to learn to live with the wolf. The population of wolves in Germany is already so big that they will increasingly cross the Dutch border.”