The wolves of Europe have somehow survived humanity’s onslaught, and it is believed there are 21,500 alive today. There are only 137 in Slovenia, and this is the story of one of them, Slavc, who walked from the area around Ljubljana north to Austria and then south to Italy. He began his trip in December 2011, when he was a year old. Because he had been collared, his travels were closely observed in the wildlife biology community, and his success led to a reintroduction of wolves in Italy, where today there are over 3,000—the largest population of any country in Europe. The author, an inveterate traveler, walked Slavc’s route a decade later. Slavc covered 746 miles, although wolves do not walk in a straight line and he may have traveled as much as 2,000 miles. He fathered dozens of offspring and is believed to have died in the summer of 2022 at the age of 12.
There exist in Europe the same tensions that dominate the wolf reintroduction issue in Colorado. The urban decision-making elites focus on and emphasize the environmental soundness of letting the predator roam, while the ranchers and farmers who lose animals to predation are diametrically opposed. Ironically, one of those elites is Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission. The predation of her pony led the EU to downgrade the wolf’s level of protection from “strictly protected” to “protected.”
