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Wolves walked 500 kilometres to return to Denmark

AFP/The Local
AFP/The Local - [email protected]
Wolves walked 500 kilometres to return to Denmark
Photo: Heiko Junge/NTB scanpix

At least five wolves, including one female, travelled over 500 kilometres to return to Denmark for the first time in two centuries, a zoologist who has obtained DNA evidence said on Thursday.

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The predators came from Germany to settle in western Denmark's agricultural region, the least densely populated in the Scandinavian country.

Peter Sunde, scientist at Aarhus University, told AFP the wolves must have walked more than 500 kilometres.

"We think these are young wolves rejected by their families who are looking for new hunting grounds," the researcher added.

Sightings of the wolves were first reported in Denmark in 2012 and researchers first suggested that the wolves sighted in Denmark were female in 2015.

READ ALSO: 'Wolf selfie' thrills Danish nature lovers

Scientists have now established a genetic profile from the faeces of five wolves -- four males and one female -- but there could be more.

"Now we have evidence (including) that there's one female," signalling the possibility of giving birth this spring, Sunde said.

Proof was also established through the wolves' fingerprints and video surveillance showed their location, which scientists refuse to reveal out of fear that it will attract hunters.

"We're following that. The wolf is an animal we're not allowed to hunt so we must protect it," Henrik Hagen Olesen, spokesman at the Danish Environmental Protection Agency, told AFP.

Exterminated by hunters, wolves had been completely extinct in Denmark since the beginning of the nineteenth century.

In other Nordic countries with a higher wolf population, culling the species, protected by the Bern Convention, is under a fierce debate between inhabitants, farmers, hunters, the government, the European Union and wildlife activists.

Both farmers and academics in Denmark have already called for something to be done about increasing numbers of suspected wolf attacks on livestock in the west of the country.

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