In our note of 29th January, we wrote about a dead she-wolf found with a steel cable around her neck in the Daleszyce Forest District.

The SAVE Wildlife Conservation Fund team assisted both the police and the Regional Directorate of the Environment Protection in establishing the course of events. After the skull was dissected, we found out that the wolf was shot with a small shot (no. 2) into the facial part of the skull. The shot was fired from about 20 m, and 19 pellets were lodged in the bones of the skull. The rope marks on the neck, the abrasions on the forelegs and the starvation indicate that the wolf was first caught in the snare and then shot, which directly contributed to or accelerated its death.

This is yet another case of a wolf shot with a firearm in Poland, indicating a lack of enforcement of wolf protection laws in our country. The state has virtually no means of controlling hunters in the field, which leaves hunters who commit crimes unpunished. You can read about the ineffectiveness of the wolf protection system in the essay “Can we protect wolves?”.

Roman Gula