Good Fences Make Good Neighbours: Ethnographic Research on the Design of the System of Herd Protection Against Wolves in the Beskydy Region

The wolf is slowly returning to Europe. The Czech Republic is no exception, after a long period without wolf presence due to its eradication, the wolf has started to repopulate the border areas of our country (e.g. Broumovsko, Beskydy, Šumava, Krušné hory) with increasing intensity in the last few decades. However, the wolf is returning to a significantly different landscape and socio-economic context than that from which it was removed in the past. Increasing rural development, the modernisation of breeding technologies and work organisation, the transformation of the subsidy system and the associated increase in bureaucratic burdens and the relative absence of danger over the last decades have all resulted in the current situation where the presence of the returning wolf is catching breeders and other stakeholders off guard and forcing them to reassess their entire approach. The return of the wolf is a very current topic and it is evident from the tense discourse between breeders and other stakeholders that the issue of coexistence with the wolf is continuously being negotiated and reshaped. Its presence generates a rich array of opinions and attitudes that reflect a number of deeper divides within Czech society, be it the clash between cultural landscape and nature, expert and local knowledge, city and countryside, or the state of czech agriculture.  

Although the wolf is often seen as a singular agent of this uncertainty, it has emerged in the context of this research as more of a exposing and accelerating element that through its presence manifests the volatility and unpredictability of the local biocultural and geopolitical space, in which simplifying and rigid infrastructures clash with the complexity and specificity of local more-than-human pluralities and as such often fail. In the midst of all this, in a whirlwind of regulations, recommendations, bureaucracy, drudgery and uncertainty, farmers are trying to navigate their lives and the care of their animals. Rather than being in a mode of adaptation, which is made very difficult by the volatility of local conditions, they live and work in a mode of anticipation that opens up space for improvisation, DIY and creativity. This is evident when looking at the design of herd protection measures against wolf attack, the main focus of my research, where a series of assemblages and interactions of living/non-living and human/non-human entities emerge around fencing in the landscape, and where the clash of simplistic design, bureaucracy, environmental volatility, local knowledge and more-than-human resistance, improvisation and ingenuity takes place.