Why Are Wild Wolves Increasingly Attacking Children in Israel?
Wild wolves are preying on small children in the Judean Desert in Israel, according to a new report in Haaretz.
The report details a series of wolf attacks that have occurred in the past four months, now tallying nine. All the incidents happened on campgrounds and in communities in the Judean Desert, and involved wolves preying on small children and babies.
No serious injuries have resulted from the attacks.
“The two latest occurrences came last weekend when two children were attacked by a wolf in the Ein Gedi Field School and another child was attacked at the Ein Gedi Spring,” Hareetz reports.
The report described one dramatic attack from May:
In May, the Ben David family from Ramat Hasharon went camping near Masada in the Judean Desert. “We were a lot of people, maybe 10 tents,” says Shilhav Ben David. She and her two small children, ages a year and a half and three, were sitting in their tent. “Suddenly an animal that looked like a dog entered, but I knew that didn’t make sense. I screamed and kicked it but it didn’t really move. Because of my screams other people came and drove it away,” she said.
The animal was a wolf. Two hours later it returned when her daughter was “five steps from the tent.” She heard her screaming and saw her on the ground with the wolf on top of her. “I saw him move his nose over her.”
“I ran and grabbed her and saw blood and holes from fangs in her lower back. It wasn’t that he tried to attack her, he really tried to grab her and take her away. He tried to prey [on her]. He went through all the children and saw she was the smallest,” said Ben David.
What’s more, “Dr. Haim Berger, an expert in wolf behavior, has found that the wolves are not attacking in order to bite, threaten or play, but to prey on the children as food,” Hareetz reported. “There is no doubt the danger is real, but the authorities, and in particular the Nature and Parks Authority, is ignoring it and is even trying to deny it, says Berger, an ecologist who wrote his doctoral thesis on the behavior of groups of animals, including wolves.”
Berger also noted that the wolves “have undergone a long process of dangerous acclimatization to human society,” through which they have lost their fear of humans and come to look at them as a source of food.
Read the full report here.
[image via screengrab]
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