THE BARBARIAN RECONVERSION:

LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD SYNDROME: Stoking Fears of the Big Bad Wolf: Residents of the Lausitz region of eastern Germany are growing increasingly fearful of wolves. As the predators encroach on human settlements, hunters and animal rights activists disagree over how dangerous these gray predators really are. (Steffen Winter, 10/22/08, Der Spiegel)

Death is Vinzenz Baberschke's constant companion. Baberschke is the mayor of the town of Radibor in the eastern German state of Saxony, and when his mobile phone rings, it sounds as if death has come knocking. His ringtone for normal calls is Ennio Morricone's "Play Me the Song of Death," but when the biologists from the local wolf control agency are on the line, his phone emits the sound of howling wolves.

In his job, Baberschke deals with both phenomena: death and the wolf. His mobile phone is rarely silent, now that wolves are becoming more widespread in the Lausitz region in Germany's easternmost corner. Agitated citizens say that they have seen wolves in their towns and villages, and they no longer allow their children to go into the forest alone. Despite the use of electric fences, shepherds are reporting dead sheep, dismembered by wolves. There have already been 16 attacks this year. "We have a leash law for dogs and regulations prohibiting the ownership of fighting dogs," the mayor, a member of the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU), growls as he sits in his office. But protection against wolves, he says, is nonexistent.

Now that the European gray wolf, a protected species, is leaving its largely deserted territory on the Muskau Heath in Germany's far southeastern corner and suddenly migrating to the north and west, into the states of Saxony-Anhalt, Hesse and Lower Saxony, something of a Little Red Riding Hood syndrome has taken hold in Germany. There are now at least 40 wolves in Germany, as well as another 40 young animals that officials appear to have lost track of. In the eastern states of Saxony and Brandenburg, there have been 800 wolf sightings in the last 10 years, and some animals have recently been seen near human settlements. While animal rights activists and conservationists are delighted, others are terrified.

The mood in the "Gute Quelle," a pub in the town of Lippitsch, is already heated enough when the mayor says: "You can't go into the forest without a knife anymore." Hunters, he adds, have seen wolves "wagging their tails expectantly" -- waiting for people. The animals, says the mayor, must be taught to respect humans, if only with rubber bullets.

The animals? How about teaching the activists to respect humans?

Posted by Orrin Judd at October 22, 2008 10:27 AM