Isère: 54 sheep killed in a wolf attack in Vercors

Fifty-four sheep from a farm were killed at the end of the week in the attack of a pack of wolves in the Vercors massif in Isère, the prefecture announced on Sunday. This carnage, during the night from Thursday to Friday in a mountain pasture in the commune of Villars-de-Lans, occurred a month and a half after a similar massive attack which killed 60 sheep in the Vercors, but in the neighboring department of Drôme this time. And this while breeders are increasingly showing their anger in all the regions affected by these predations, asking the State to kill more wolves, which in turn triggers the anger of wildlife defense organizations.

In the middle of the night, in the Fauge mountain pasture, 54 sheep from the same farm died and eight were injured, the Isère prefecture told AFP, confirming information from the daily Dauphiné Libéré. Of the 54, around fifteen sheep were killed directly by the wolves, the rest having succumbed to suffocation by piling up at the bottom of a valley into which they had fallen while fleeing predators, Sébastien Mollet, head of the departmental service of the French Biodiversity Office (OFB) for Isère, told AFP.

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64 sheep killed in August

On the night of August 30 to 31, a pack of wolves also killed or caused the death of 64 sheep from the same farm in the town of Bouvante, in Drôme, about twenty kilometers southwest of Villars-de-Lans. The killing of wolves is regulated by law. It is prohibited in the natural environment, except for the purposes of defending herds. A procedure is defined for “sampling shots”, i.e. regardless of the attack on a herd in progress. A maximum number of wolves that can be killed is set each year, out of a population estimated at just over a thousand individuals in 2026. A figure that is largely underestimated, breeders accuse.

Each year, they deplore more than 10,000 losses of animals in wolf attacks. At the Livestock Summit on Thursday in Auvergne, the Minister of Agriculture Annie Genevard confirmed to them that the quota of wolves that people authorized by the prefectures to kill - mainly wolf scouts under the authority of the OFBs - will be increased "in the coming days" from 21 to 23% of the recorded population. The territories frequented by the wolf have continually expanded over ten years, going from less than 10 departments to more than 60.