Angela de Jong supports the shooting of the biting wolf in Wapse in Drenthe. In any case, she thinks that the whole beast does not really fit in the Netherlands. “We are too small a country for that.”
For the first time since his return to the Netherlands, the wolf has arrived in our country bitten a person, namely last weekend in Wapse in Drenthe. The wolf was shot shortly afterwards. Nature conservation organizations are angry about this and are therefore reporting this to the police. They said there was no acute danger.
Face to face with wolf
Hélène Hendriks brought it up last night in her talk show De Oranjezomer. “Angela, what would you do if you came face to face with a wolf?”
AD tiger shark Angela then: “My first impulse is to run away very fast, but I don’t think that’s the right one… Yes, you have experience…”
Rutger Castricum, who came face to face with two wolves in the spring: “I did it.”
Angela: “Freeze. That could be possible, right?”
‘Fired? Justifiably!’
Hélène: “I read in your newspaper that what you have to do is stand against the wall and shout ‘fire’ very loudly. Or against a tree. And wanted to make arm gestures. No, but without kidding: there has of course been a biting incident in Wapse in Drenthe. The wolf was then shot. What do you think of that?”
Angela supports the shooting of the wolf. “That the wolf was shot? Yes, that seems right to me. But now everyone is getting very angry with me again, because the wolf is now just as bad as the nitrogen problem and all other problems in the Netherlands. You are either for or against and there is no middle ground.”
‘Really bad’
Nature lover Raymond Mens has trouble shooting the wolf. “I am very sorry to read that, yes, and I would rather not, but I can imagine that if he bites someone – I think he bit a farmer – you have no choice. Then unfortunately it has to, but rather not, no. I am very sorry, yes.”
He continues: “I think it’s ridiculous how people report about it. That wolf is attacking someone… In this case – and I get that too – that farmer wants to protect his cattle, so he jumped in and went to that wolf. Yes, then you come between a predator and its prey. That beast also wants a bite to eat. That’s just how it works; that beast is hungry.”
Scary monster
Hélène: “But if it’s your sheep, Raymond.”
Raymond: “Yes, I get that, but it’s not a scary monster. It is an animal that is hungry and eats another animal.”
Johan Derksen says in between in a start: “They destroy everything! There was a meeting of a farmers’ organization here in the village recently and they just said, ‘Guys, enough is enough. We have The Hague, we have the province, we have the municipality and they do nothing. Do you know what we do? We all buy shotguns and we shoot them.’”
Too small country
Angela: “They will be happy that Johan calls that. Haha. (…) Don’t you think that sometimes we want too much in this country? And the wolf… We are just too small a country for that, aren’t we?”
Raymond: “We are too small a country for too many wolves, but I think that will settle down on its own.”
Rutger: “We have no nature here. You may want to, but…”
Raymond: “We do have nature, but we are not used to nature. When the weather is nice, we all go into the Veluwe with our sandals and we all come home with Lyme disease and there is a predator – which is also good for keeping the population in check… You are going against nature eh?”
“Doesn’t belong here!”
Angela: “At the Hoge Veluwe they don’t think so, do they? They do not think that it benefits the population.”
Raymond: “They are against that, yes, but I find it too easy to paint the picture of ‘the very scary wolf’.”
Rutger: “He doesn’t belong here! We don’t have nature here! He belongs in Germany. There you have extensive forests, but we are too densely populated and have little untouched nature. The wolf doesn’t belong there.”