Bring Back the Wolf - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 115

There is a possible deterrent which has not been widely discussed in
Europe, though it is used in South Africa to protect animals against
lions and other predators, and in America to tackle coyotes. The live-
stock protection collar carries a chemical in two capsules at the
animal's throat, ensuring that a predator ingests it when it kills. In the
US, sheep farmers load it with deadly poisons, but an emetic (a com-
pound which causes vomiting) could deter predators from attacking
that kind of livestock again. A Swiss biologist has designed another
clever device: a collar that monitors a sheep's heartbeat. If the rate
rises and stays high for long enough, the collar sends a text message
to the farmer. Sheep become distressed as soon as they see a wolf, so
the farmer could have time to reach them before the wolves attack. 58
The same collar could also produce noises of the kind a human would
make, to frighten the wolves away before the farmer arrived.
Alternatively, a wolf that makes a habit of killing sheep can simply
be shot. Though I hate the thought of killing wolves, and could never
do so myself, I think we should be able to love wildlife without being
unreasonably sentimental.
In fact hunting, strange as this may sound, could be the wolf's sal-
vation. There are three reasons for this. The first is that, as with wild
boar, allowing licensed hunters to shoot wolves is likely to create a
powerful lobby for their protection, just as anglers have become the
staunchest defenders of fish stocks. The second is that it shows other
people that the animals are under control. I feel we control our wild-
life too much, but the wolf has a public relations problem, and the
idea that it should be allowed to roam and breed without check is
likely to be too much for many people to contemplate. Licensed hunt-
ing in Sweden has gone some way towards making the wolf politically
acceptable there, after it reintroduced itself from Finland in the 1970s,
provoking widespread demands that it be exterminated. 59 I was told
something similar by a forest officer in Slovenia: were it not for the
authorized hunting of wolves and bears, they would be wiped out by
unauthorized hunters, concerned that no one was managing them. In
both countries, however, the number of wolves hunters are allowed to
shoot every year is a highly contentious issue: over-hunting is sup-
pressing the population of wolves to the extent that their genetic
viability is threatened.