Tyrol farming chief demands more wolf culls after record year
Monday 14th September 2026 on 09:01 in
Austria
Austria has officially shot 26 wolves this year, a record, but Josef Hechenberger, president of the Tyrol Chamber of Agriculture, is calling for further culls. He told ORF’s ZIB 2 programme on Sunday that livestock farming in the Alps could not be adequately protected without them.
Wolf packs are currently found mainly in northern Lower Austria and Upper Austria, as well as in southern Austria. Many individual wolves are present in Carinthia and Tyrol. Wolves may be shot under certain conditions because they repeatedly kill livestock.
The WWF criticised the high number of shootings, saying many provinces lacked the political will to address conflicts with wolves in other ways. It called for stronger support for livestock protection measures and more public information instead.
“Shootings often even increase the number of attacks,” the WWF said. Allowing packs to establish themselves and strengthening livestock protection would be better solutions, it argued, because wolf packs are capable of learning and could help stabilise the situation.
Hechenberger said the number of documented individual wolves in Tyrol had tripled this year. He also pointed to an estimated 22,000 to 25,000 wolves in Europe. The species’ protection status was lowered from “strictly protected” to “protected” last year, and Hechenberger said Austria now needed active wolf management.
Under Section 52b of Tyrol’s hunting law, a wolf can be killed without a specific culling order in an imminent-danger situation if it is near an actively managed alpine pasture, Hechenberger said. He referred to a recent case in the Pitztal, where authorities are investigating whether such a danger existed.
“If we do not act, alpine farming will die out,” Hechenberger said. He argued that only wolves posing a particular risk or having already caused damage should be removed.
Hechenberger also said livestock protection projects were impossible on alpine pastures. Fences could not be driven into rocky high-mountain terrain, he said, while protection dogs could pose a safety risk on heavily used hiking trails.