Call of the Wild
1 What information can be found in the article? Tick one. [1] i. what wolves eat ii. why Ms Versteeg photographed the wolf iii. the fact that wolf numbers are increasing iv. why wolves are the Western world’s top predator
In August 2011 Desiree Versteeg, a Dutch citizen, was driving home in the
suburbs of Arnhem, in the east of the Netherlands, when she saw an animal in the
road. ‘At first I thought it was a dog or a fox. Then – I couldn’t believe my eyes –
I saw it was a wolf.’ She got out of the car to take a picture. ‘I was seven or eight
metres away from him. He couldn’t get away because a fence was blocking his
path. He turned and stared at me. That was frightening.’ Both she and the wolf
fled.
From Ms Versteeg’s photographs, and from the body of a deer found nearby,
scientists verified that she was the first person to have seen a wolf in the
Netherlands since 1897. Having talked to the experts, she now thinks that the
wolf was probably more afraid than she was. ‘But at the time all you know is: it’s
a wolf, it’s a predator and I’m in its way.’
Ms Versteeg’s experience illustrates a dramatic change that has taken place in the
West over the past couple of decades. Attitudes to wolves have changed. For the
first time in history, people have stopped trying to kill them and taken to
protecting them instead.
However, this effort to protect wolves has been too successful and wolves are
now returning to areas from which they disappeared as much as a century ago.
There are disagreements over whether mankind can live side-by-side with a
species that was once the Western world’s top predator?