With regard to the "aggressions" attributed to what is called by the newspapers "The Wolf of Vasto", our Association wishes to express its opinion, within a complex affair on which, as far as we know, there is no communication of an institutional nature, and whose reconstruction can only be done through the media and information gathered in the field.
For the record, the "wolf of Vasto", whose first assault is recorded on August 7, 2022is, one year later, hypothetically responsible for 11 other attacks, fortunately not serious, to the detriment of people, even if there are no certainties, as far as we know, that it is always the same specimen. Already on the occasion of the first event on August 7, 2022, the technicians of the Maiella Park they would have confirmed the hypothesis that the person responsible for the attack on the 37-year-old tourist could actually be a wolf, yet since then nothing seems to have changed, with the attacks that have followed and with the wolf as of today, August 24, 2023, still free in the area.
Setting aside management initiatives and authorization procedures, afflicted by a slowness that is more embarrassing than chronic, with the green light for capture by the Ministry of the Environment only arrived in June of this year (perhaps because no one had asked permission before then?) and with the impossibility of finding official information on the animal, we would like to clarify how the story of the wolf of Vasto is, from our point of view, yet another mirror of Italian wildlife management.
In particular, there are several reasons why it seems intolerable that the wolf of Vasto is still free and the first is certainly that of people's safety, which must be guaranteed in the face of exceptional and unusual cases such as this one, where a specimen of a highly elusive species such as the wolf, which has always feared man and kept well away from him, repeatedly shows aggressive behavior towards people.
The immobility towards this specimen ends, moreover, to damage the perception of the wolf species towards all ordinary citizens, who, already exhausted by out-of-control disinformation, find themselves perceiving any specimen as a danger to their own safety, rather than understanding that it is of a single exceptional case, which had to be solved already a year ago.
So today we ask ourselves if everything necessary has been done and if the Abruzzo Region and ISPRA, Higher Institute for Environmental Protection and Research, have really understood how a decisive change of course is necessary to clarify, understand the causes and intervene effectively with respect to these rare cases.
In conclusion, we cannot fail to highlight the greatest paradox of this all-Italian "management", a short-circuit which sees on the one hand a wolf aggressive towards people, hypothetically responsible for over a dozen events, for which arrest is ordered and an enclosure is also prepared to cage him for life, on the other of wolves who simply "play wolves" and which are responsible for the death of some cattle, for which the Higher Institute for Environmental Protection and Research expresses a positive opinion for the abatement, as in the case of Malga Boldera, in Trentino.