The Spanish parliament has voted through a measure that will in effect lift the hunting ban on wolves that was imposed in 2021.
A coalition led by the conservative People’s party, with the support of the far-right Vox party and Basque and Catalan nationalists, added an amendment to a law aimed at reducing Spain’s estimated 1.2bn kilos of food waste.
The amendment says that wolves create food waste in the form of 14m kilos of meat in the remains of the 14,000 sheep and cattle they allegedly kill each year. In Castilla y León, the region with the largest wolf population, farmers’ organisations claim that in 2024 wolves killed about 6,000 head of livestock.