Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Danish Wolf?
Wolves from Germany have been creeping into Denmark, igniting a fierce debate about whether the landscape and culture are ready for them.
On a January evening, a young wolf approached a teenage girl in a village in western Denmark. In the now-viral clip, the wolf padded into the light of a streetlamp, venturing close enough that 14-year-old Anne Puggaard, who was filming, could have reached out to touch it. As Anne retreated, the wolf matched her step for step—but without a hint of aggression.
By mid-August, a similar wolf lay dead, his lips drawn back in a slight snarl at the feet of Denmark’s nature minister during a press conference on “problem wolves.” Authorities admit they aren’t certain this was the wolf that approached Anne, but since September 1, anyone in Denmark is allowed to shoot and kill wolves they believe pose a danger to themselves or their animals, if a warning shot doesn’t scare them away.
Until the 2010s, the last wolf seen in Denmark was in 1813. After 200 years without large predators who could threaten livestock—or humans—Denmark is scrambling to adjust to the return of the wolf, who are rewilding themselves across Europe. While the United States has purposefully reintroduced wolves to areas where they were driven extinct, European wolves have needed no invitation, returning of their own accord to historical hunting grounds that have been converted to farmlands and neighborhoods.
Since 2021, Denmark’s wolf population has ballooned. As a result, says Peter Sunde, Denmark’s foremost wolf biologist and professor at Aarhus University, young packs have settled in locations ripe for conflict: a region full of family farms and villages popular with summer holidaymakers.
The centuries without predators seem to have left the Danes unsure of how to live alongside a powerful animal. Some Danes insist any risk from wolves is unacceptable, while others seem oblivious to the potential danger: there’s evidence someone has been feeding young wolves, Sunde says. Fixing the problem, he explains, “will be more about managing human behavior than it is about managing wolf behavior.”
The wolves in Denmark today can trace their ancestry to packs that rode out the systematic poisoning, trapping, and shooting of large predators in the 19th and 20th centuries in ancient forests of northeastern Poland. After EU-wide legislation in the 1980s and 1990s made it illegal to kill wolves and protected their habitat, their numbers began to rebound. Polish wolves moved into to Germany in 2000 and from there spread into Belgium and the Netherlands.
In 2012, a birdwatcher spotted the first wolf in Denmark in nearly 200 years, but it took another decade for the lupine pioneers to gain a real foothold. Jutland, the Danish region that shares a border with Germany and where the wolves entered, is highly developed, a patchwork of croplands and pastures where cows and sheep graze. “There’s no such thing as wilderness,” Sunde says. “Even the forests are planted.”
Bachelor wolves ventured deeper into Denmark while a handful of breeding pairs had pups, but none of the young packs lasted more than a year, with many wolves found shot. That changed in 2021, when a breeding pair set up camp in a nature park, five square miles of fenced-in heathland with a resident population of red and roe deer. When their pups survived and reached maturity, the wolf population began to “snowball,” says Sunde. In 2021, there were 14 wolves in Denmark. This past spring, there were an estimated 49 adult wolves and at least 61 pups were born.
There hadn’t been predators that could take down an adult sheep for generations, and Sunde says farmers and the Danish government have been slow to invest in basic infrastructure to protect livestock, despite warnings from ecologists. The past five years have been a free-for-all, with the Danish ministry of nature tallying 1,285 livestock animals killed by wolves in 2025.
But Åse Svendsen, a sheep farmer in Skærbæk, Denmark, says she believes that the government-confirmed kills are just the “tip of the iceberg.” She has received compensation for 23 lambs and ewes lost to wolves over the past few years. Since 2024, she’s invested about 400,000 kroner, or $61,000, in wolf-proof fences—ten kilometers’ worth of five lines of electrified wire, partially subsidized by the government. (The government has paid at least 36 million kroner, or about $5.5 million, to farmers, though the exact figure is unknown.) This year, she’s bought two more livestock guardian dogs, for a total of six—fluffy Maremma puppies from Portugal who perform a “little concert” of howls in response to the daily wolfsong she can hear from her kitchen.
Svendsen says it’s time for someone in Denmark to “take the reins” and decide how many wolves the area can handle. “We should be able to quickly protect [a threatened species], but also quickly to take away the protection, especially with such a big, dangerous animal as a wolf,” she says.
Farmers like Svendsen have found an unexpected champion in Denmark’s minister for nature and animal welfare, Christian Rabjerg Madsen—the man who held the press conference over the dead wolf’s body and who has been pushing to make it legal to shoot wolves, even when they’re not an immediate threat.
But to understand the Danish nature minister’s response to the wolf crisis, you must understand the Danish relationship with nature, says Hans Peter Hansen, a sociologist who studies human-wildlife conflict and specializes in wolves. “Basically all Danes are brought up with this idea of the soft and peaceful landscape,” Hansen says. “Suddenly the wolves enter our sphere, and it challenges our perception of nature and our perception of our relationship with nature.”
Denmark is “nature-deprived,” managed by humans like a big garden, Sunde says. The climate, too, is serene: Summers and winters are both very mild, and there are few extreme weather events (although sometimes it rains enough to flood basements, or the wind blows hard enough to knock over cyclists). The Danish nature agency describes the wood tick as the most dangerous animal in Denmark, and foraging for berries and mushrooms is a national pastime.
As a result, Danes can be reluctant to adapt to a version of nature that includes danger, Hansen says. In July, nearby where teenage Anne met the young wolf, local authorities passed out flyers to holiday visitors urging them to “offer maximum resistance” in the face of a wolf attack: “hit and kick and use any blunt weapon.” In August, a jogger in a remote beachside nature park surprised a wolf with his pups. Scientists who reviewed footage of the encounter confirmed the wolf reacted as one might expect a wolf to react in that situation—baring its teeth, arching its back, darting forward before ultimately retreating—but Rabjerg Madsen told the press that the wolf should still be killed for causing “insecurity.” A handful of other Danish politicians say wolves should be exterminated or driven back into Germany. “The minister has publicly issued a wish that he wanted this wolf dead, not because it was a danger, but because people could be scared by this behavior,” Sunde says.
On the other side of the equation, some people seem to have been too welcoming to wolves. “Some people are not afraid enough,” Hansen says. He recalls a public forum where a local politician, who supports the return of the wolves, said she wasn’t afraid to let her small children play alone in the forest. When Sunde and other wolf experts said that wasn’t wise, “that was a shock to that woman,” Hansen says.
Most worrisome is what experts describe as unmistakable evidence that someone has been feeding the wolves. Experts describe “problem wolves” that aren’t shy—they don’t retreat when humans approach them, or they’re bold enough to raid unoccupied camp sites. But some of the wolves in Denmark are different, Sunde says. The wolf that Anne encountered approached her expecting something good to happen. “They have been accustomed to get a reward from humans, and if you’re a young wolf, the reward is food,” he explains. “This kind of behavior, you can’t really explain it in any other way.”
Once an animal reaches that level of familiarity with humans, putting them down is the best option, Sunde says. “Even though it was a very friendly wolf, we know from experience from other countries that [wolves that approach humans] may also start to consider children as potential prey,” he explains. In 2025, for example, a 6-year-old in the Netherlands was dragged into the woods by a wolf with a history of aggression towards humans. (The boy, saved by two adults who beat the wolf with sticks, was treated for bite marks and scratches.)
A few weeks after the wolf approached Anne in January, Sunde encouraged government officials to take action. Despite their strong rhetoric, officials were slow to act, Sunde says, eventually issuing permits to members of the public to shoot wolves under specific circumstances. But then in August, children playing outside at three separate homes in the town of Nørre Nebel were approached by a wolf; though it showed no sign of aggression, it was also undeterred by shouting and loud clapping. That’s when the government deployed a team of employees with thermal drones and shotguns to hunt the wolf down. In little more than a week, he was dead.
For now, the EU Commission has rejected Rabjerg Madsen’s idea that wolves can be shot just because people don’t want them as neighbors—though shooting wolves believed to pose an imminent danger stands. In a statement to National Geographic, Rabjerg Madsen said he remains concerned for the “loss of freedom for those that do not feel safe in areas where the wolf has settled” and said he intended to “continue to put pressure…on the European Commission.”
The Commission rolled back protections for wolves in 2025, downgrading them from “highly protected” to “protected.” It’s been reported that Ursula von der Leyen, the German president of the European Commission, lost her beloved family pony Dolly to wolves in 2022 and has lobbied heavily to relax protections for wolves ever since.
Most scientists agree the move was premature—wolves now number more than 20,000, but the populations aren’t genetically diverse enough to relax protections, they argue. Instead, researchers are working on other ways to deal with “problem” wolves. In central Europe, there are ongoing projects to see if positive associations with humans can be reversed. This “negative conditioning” consists of GPS tracking and “systematically harassing” bold wolves using airhorns and paintball guns, Sunde says.
If Denmark’s new rules are followed to the letter and wolves are shot only if they pose an imminent threat to people or animals, Sunde says it shouldn’t affect the population’s trajectory—the population will continue to grow. As farmers and the government invest in protective infrastructure, attacks on livestock should drop dramatically and litter sizes will shrink as the population reaches its capacity.
Researchers say the effects of recent anti-wolf rhetoric could show up by next spring, when scientists plan to tally how many of this year’s 61 pups have survived their inevitable brushes with humans. “If we give nature its way, then we will end with about 30 family groups,” Sunde says. “Politicians may have other plans.”
