Why Brussels won’t object to being eaten by a pack of wolves

By Rein F. Deer

Date: 08/12/05

The beasts are in for a feast in Finland. Some bureaucratic genius at the Berlaymont has triggered a legal action against Finland on wolf hunting. In fact, the Commission is of the opinion that Finland could do with a lot more wolves (canis lupus).

The Finns, who disagree, suspect there is a mole (microtus arvalis) inside the Commission feeding misleading information to the genius and his colleagues and provoking every sillier proposals.

NGOs are often fronts for foreign intelligence according to Nikolai Patrushev, head of the FSB security service in Vladimir Putin's Russia. He should know. Most of the NGOs in the Western world were established during the good old days of the USSR with the aim of messing up our corrupt Western ways.

Even if the pro-wolf action is not the work of a post-Communist mole, it should be said that of the hundreds of ways to recruit new enemies for the EU, the NGOs know all of them and are constantly inventing new ones.

You might think that, say, 1,000 instead of today's 200 wolves in a country as sparsely populated as Finland is no big deal. The Finns beg to differ. They have a curious tradition called everyman's right; it allows the public to pick wild berries or mushrooms everywhere, even on private land.

Theoretically, these great outdoor people run the constant risk of running into packs of bloodthirsty wolves when they are out in the Finnish wilderness. In practice they never do and in any event everyone knows that wolves will make a quick escape whenever they run into people. And also, Finns are as brave as lions.

Their real fear is not for themselves but for more agreeable animals, such as my namesake the reindeer (rangifer rudolphus), dogs (canis familiaris), lambs (ovis aries) and calves (bos taurus), all favourites on the lupine menu.

For the average Finnish wolf, a cow-shed or backyard is the equivalent of the smörgœsbord on Nordic ferries.

The Commission's solution is for domestic animals to be kept indoors, and wolves prevented from coming too close to human habitations. This must sound pretty neat to the quicksilver minds behind all those swivelling layers of glass on the Rond-Point Schuman.

But to Finns it sounds more like the latest thinking on crime-fighting, namely that the good guys should stay behind fences while the baddies carry on doing what they normally do, ie killing and looting, but outdoors.

The more the Commission meddles with issues which the subsidiarity principle plainly dictates are none of its business, the more it demonstrates it has, as they say here in Belgium, "lost the North".

Comment feature on the Finnish everyman's right and the legal action taken by the European Commission against wolf-hunting in the country.