After centuries of persecution that left Western Europe almost wolfless, the gray wolf has staged one of conservation's most dramatic comebacks. From France to Germany to Switzerland, wolves are recolonising their ancestral range, and forcing Europe to relearn how to live alongside them.
Exterminated, Then Returned
By the mid-20th century, the gray wolf had been hunted to extinction across almost all of Western Europe. France and Germany were among the countries left without them.
Then, in the early 1990s, wolves came back to France on their own, without any reintroduction programme. They just walked back.
>> "Wolves don't need human permission to return. They need human tolerance, and the law to enforce it."
The Numbers Today
France now holds over 1,000 wolves, a population grown entirely through natural return. In Germany, the first wolf pack was confirmed in 2000; by the 2024/25 monitoring year the country counted 222 packs.
The legal foundation was the Bern Convention and the EU Habitats Directive, which made the wolf a strictly protected species. That protection is now loosening. In December 2024 the Bern Convention moved the wolf from "strictly protected" to "protected", the EU then revised its own rules, and in February 2026 France raised the number of wolves that may be culled each year to 21% of the population, or 227 animals.
What Wolves Rebuild
Wolves don't return alone. As apex predators, they can change where and how their prey feed, and scientists call the knock-on effects through a food web a trophic cascade. How strong those effects are in Europe's farmed and crowded landscapes is still being studied.
The best-known case is Yellowstone, where 41 wild wolves from Canada and northwest Montana were released between 1995 and 1997, after extermination programmes had wiped wolves out of most of the United States by the early 1900s. The park has become a living laboratory for how wolves affect the rest of the ecosystem, and scientists still debate how far those effects reach.
>> "The wolf is not a problem to be managed. It is a solution that nature has already deployed."
Living Alongside Wolves
Coexistence has a cost, and farmers carry much of it. France spends around 40 million euros of public money a year helping herders protect their flocks with guardian dogs, electric fencing and shepherds, and the government itself says protecting herds remains the best defence against a protected predator.
The wolves came back on their own. Whether they stay depends on whether we choose to let them.
_Sources: French Ministry of Ecological Transition and Ministry of Agriculture, "Plan national d'actions 2024-2029 sur le loup et les activités d'élevage", 2024. French Ministry of Ecological Transition press release, "Réforme des règles de gestion de la prédation du loup", 24 February 2026. DBBW (German Federal Documentation and Advice Centre on Wolves), confirmed wolf territories in Germany 2000/01 to 2025/26, accessed 9 November 2026. IUCN, "Concerns over EU's wolf downlisting proposal", 13 December 2024. US National Park Service, "Wolves" (Yellowstone National Park)._