Is a nice slogan but a hollowed one also
There are thousands of millions of people that live with wolves in their houses. And they massively love the experience and claim that it improves their lives. Wolves and dogs are the same species. This means also that wolves are the animal that saved more human lives, by a mile, after humans.
----- but you referred to the wild big bad wolf... Okay
Wolves are shy and don't attack humans if they can avoid it
Registered wolves attacks on people in the last 100 years are not zero. Wolves are the only wild terrestrial animal in the Western countries that would deliberately help, adopt and feed a lost children in distress, so is a negative value and should be expressed as "X people saved by wolves this decade.
Wolves save lives in other ways also. Drivers will see their risk to die in a car crash against a wild boar, a dog or a deer drastically reduced. See "ecology of fear".
And they chase off feral dogs that in fact do attack humans each year.
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Wolves protect cattle and people from disease
Not catching Lyme disease is a good thing
Dutch parents will appreciate also that the cheese and milk that his children consume is free from bovine tuberculosis.
Netherlands is free from the disease but in can reenter at any time. In 2026 four people in the Netherlands suffered the disease.
Farmers fear bovine tuberculosis. One positive means your farm being quarantined and forbidden to sell dairy or meat for an indefinite time. Often having to sacrifice and dump every one of your cows. The air transmission from animal to human is also possible and the disease is not easy to detect in their first stages.
The return of the wolves to Netherlands adds a new layer of protection. They will take good care of assuring that the wildlife does not get the disease.
And before you reply with: "but distemper", rabies is a problem technically solved long time ago in developed countries. Meat baits and an helicopter will grant you that every fox, ferret and wolf in the area will get its vaccine. Poland and Austria do this since 80's with stellar results.
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Wolves benefit hunters
A well documented effect of wolves on the populations of their preys is a drastic improvement in the size and quality of deer trophies by genetic selection when wolves appear. Hunters find desirable having bigger and healthier deer, so wolves provide a valuable service.
"But wolves in my area will ate 150 deer this year!", yep they will do.
Lets imagine that I offer you to choose between two options. I will offer you 10000 dollars, but you can keep the first 150, and then we will trow a dice with a 1% of probability of earning the other 9850 dollars.
Or I will give you "only 9850 dollars" and you'll lose this nice 150 bucks forever.
What option would you choose?
Hunters choose the same. Each time wolves had been extirpated from an area, soon epidemics appeared to decimate the deer population and killing, not hundreds, thousands or tens thousands of deer. It happened in Spain on 2022. It happens all the time.
Also if you think that removing the wolves will stop the attacks to cattle, think again. Is guaranteed, and has been proven several times, that it will increase the attacks.
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Alive wolves may be a touristic resource.
Since 1970 wolf reintroduction, places around Yellowstone started to notice millions of dollars extra each year, because wolves are the only big carnivore in the area that uses the day to frolic in open spaces all around the year (bears sleep for months and cougars are elusive and nocturnal). Tourists love to watch wolves from a safe distance, and travel from far away to see them. Wolves are a touristic magnet.
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Wolves will benefit the huge sector of agriculture and ornamental plants in Holland.
Tulip breeders will have less bulbs unearthed by wild boards. They should be happy about that.
Farmers will have fewer damages in their vegetable or cereal crops, and insurance companies will pay less by those.
Is the damage done on cattle more than the money earned or saved by all the other wolf services?
I doubt it, but farmers can pay anytime they want to remove bovine tuberculosis, screwworms, etc, etc, from each deer and wild boar in the country. If they create the problem by not allowing wolves in the place, maybe they should fix it with their own time and money instead to tax other for that.
I never found a politician that will frown upon the idea of saving taxes in disease cleaning campaigns or forest restoration, because wolves to this for free and those taxes can be used now in other things.
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I assure you that a lot of the people that live with wolves don't have any problem with being safer, richer and healthier