Seger baron van Voorst tot Voorst has a complicated problem, Pieter Hotse Smit wrote in Monday de Volkskrant. He is director of Park de Hoge Veluwe and there are about 220 mouflons and two wolves there and that does not match. The mouflons celebrated their centenary in the Hoge Veluwe in 2021, the wolves crawled through a hole in the fence around the park last year. Since then they have given the mouflon the nerves and Van Voorst tot Voorst too. Due to the wolf terror, the mouflon herd has now been halved – the park restaurant had already had to remove the mouflon stew from the menu due to a lack of mouflon meat.
That is the outcome of our nature management, another word for human control, inspired by the otherwise justified idea that there is no room at all for real nature in this country. And that you have to check, regulate and fence what still somewhat resembles that. So that nature lovers come to your park, first have a cup of coffee and then go on a bicycle safari.
“Hey, if that’s not a mouflon!”
The mouflons are exotics that actually do not belong in the Netherlands. They arrived in the Veluwe from Corsica at the hands of Grand Duchess Charlotte of Luxembourg, as a present and attractive hunting object for her Dutch royal relatives. They had already brought the wild boar to the Veluwe, in order to have some fun.
Coincidentally, the mouflon turned out to be an animal that liked the young Scots pine. He thus won the love of nature conservationists: it prevented heath and drifting sand from turning into pine forest. According to the European nature guidelines, the Netherlands must ensure that dry heath, poor grassland and drifting sand continue to exist, because the natterjack toad, the slow worm, the sand lizard and the smooth snake can flourish there. As well as the little moth.
Is the protected wolf worth more than the protected little moth?
The unprotected mouflon has been promoted from bullet catcher to protector of biodiversity. Because of his intolerant behavior towards the mouflon, the protected wolf threatens to put an end to that status. That is of course not possible, because from now on we will have to tear out those Scots pines by hand, one by one, if the small heather moth does not want to disappear.
Director Van Voorst tot Voorst has therefore organized the exhibition ‘Save the mouflon’ in the park museum. With photos of mouflons torn by wolves, because if we find something unbearable, it is that animals are fighting each other in the wild. We find predators unsympathetic anyway. We passionately long to return to paradise, where the lion played with the lamb and was a vegetarian.
Wolves being fed a mouflon stew OK, that would be tolerable, but please don’t go through the primitive stuff of hunting and killing and blood – leave that to us.
Van Voorst tot Voorst wants to get rid of the protected status of the wolf and assign it to the mouflon. The wolf is of no use to him, he says. That is the fine Dutch utility thinking in nature. If the wolf could be made to eat a Scots pine instead of mouflons, there was talk. But the wolf does not, so Van Voorst tot Voorst wants to deny the predator access to his park.
A part of the fenced Hoge Veluwe has now been fenced again. In that space, forty mouflons are extra protected by meters high electric fence and security cameras. From the recordings made with it you could nicely see the compilation Wild nature in the Netherlands can make.