The fear of the wolf had set in in August.
“When an animal is able to approach houses or stalls to kill calves, ewes and heifers weighing 200 kg, we begin to be afraid for ourselves and the children”: a breeder from Val-d ' Ajol, in the very south of the Vosges department, made this observation on September 7.
At dawn, at the time of milking, he had found three dead calves killed by a canine which was not its first victims, according to Vosges-Matin.
Since August 11, the beast had caused carnage in the Vosges and neighboring Haute-Saône: 20 sheep and 15 young cattle died under its fangs in often atypical circumstances.
He attacked them in buildings.
Unimaginable for a local wolf.
Among breeders, the tone rises against this canine defended by a string of associations.
But the "particularly important" predatory behavior led the French authorities to issue a shooting authorization in order to shoot him down.
What was done while he was chasing cattle on the night of September 22 to 23, 2020 in Val-d'Ajol.
A long lonely journey
The French Biodiversity Office (OFB) revealed on Wednesday that the beast came from afar.
The genetic analysis of the remains showed "a signature typical of the wolf populations of Central Europe and the Baltic and not of the Franco-Italian strain historically present on French territory since the beginning of the 1990s", explained the 'OFB.
According to the research of biologists, this wolf, first identified from a sample of excrement on January 1, 2020, was born in 2019 in the Herzlake pack in Lower Saxony (Germany) near Meppen.
Over the months, he passed through the Netherlands, Belgium, the German-Luxembourg border in Rhineland-Palatinate (Germany) before arriving in France in the Vosges and Haute-Saône.
During its journey, the animal claimed many lives, including more than 50 sheep in the Netherlands.
He was also struck by a van in Belgium but this incident did not affect him.