De Hoge Veluwe National Park is going to evacuate mouflons to protect them against the wolf. This is necessary to preserve the unique animal species, says park manager Jakob Leidekker Broadcasting Gelderland. “We want to prevent the animals from being killed by the wolf.”
Employees of De Hoge Veluwe National Park have found dozens of mouflon carcasses in recent weeks. The animals are killed by a she-wolf, who was able to enter the park through a hole in the fence this summer.
Leidekker expects that even more mouflons have been killed than is known so far, because not all dead mouflons have been found.
Rather mouflon than wolf
The animals are now housed behind a wolf-resistant fence. “They are safe there and they can just live,” says Leidekker. Some of the mouflons are transferred abroad, because it is not possible to keep all the animals within the fence for a longer period of time.
According to Leidekker, the employees of De Hoge Veluwe National Park are “very sorry to have to do this”. He himself would rather lose the wolf than the mouflon. “But because the wolf is heavily protected, we can’t do much about it. Otherwise it would have been much easier.”
The park manager says he is in talks with the government to find a solution.
Onmisbare grazer
For the Hoge Veluwe, the move of the mouflon is a loss, because the animal is important for nature conservation. “Because the animals graze there, we prevent the unique heath and sandy soils from overgrowth. If we remove all mouflons, the area will be a forest in ten years. We really shouldn’t want that.”
That’s why the plan is for the mouflons to come back when the wolf is gone from the park. “So we can go back to the situation it was before the wolf came.”
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