Wolves and livestock don’t mix, and stockmen from time immemorial have fought to protect their herds from the predators.

It’s a story familiar to cattle and sheep producers in the American West. Now, we hear, producers in Switzerland are facing increased attacks from gray wolves.

They aren’t taking it with the unquestioning respect for the rules that the Swiss are usually known for.

According to the BBC, wolves were hunted to near extinction in much of Europe. They were successfully reintroduced in Switzerland in the 1990s — so successfully that high mountain farmers quickly noticed that their sheep were falling prey to the wolves.

In the beginning, farmers were allowed to remove “problem” wolves, but in 2020 Swiss voters reaffirmed the wolves’ protected status.

There are now more than 300 wolves in 32 packs across the country. For comparison, Oregon is six times bigger than Switzerland and has less than 200 wolves.

Wolves are making a regular buffet of Swiss sheep herds. Farmers there want to cut the number of wolf packs by half.

Sandro Michael belongs to a farmers’ association in the eastern canton of Grisons.

“We’ve got 14 wolf packs in the canton now,” Michael told the BBC. “We’ve tried with fences, sheepdogs, shepherds, and livestock are still getting attacked.”

Last summer they lobbied the government to cull the wolf packs to reduce predation. The national government gave the country’s 26 cantons, the political subdivisions comparable to U.S. states, authority to cull whole packs.

Swiss environmental groups filed suit, arguing that predation rates have not risen as fast as the wolf population has grown, proof that deterrents put in place by farmers are keeping the wolves at bay. The courts agreed.

Last week, growers dumped 12 dead sheep killed the night before by wolves at the door of the government headquarters of the canton of Vaud as a graphic protest.

“These sheep were killed last night,” Eric Herb, a member of a Swiss association demanding the regulation of big predators, told the Keystone-ATS news agency.

“It is really time to act. The breeders have played nice until now, but this time it was too much.”

Farmers say the cull is necessary to protect their herds and to maintain their alpine communities.

“We are sick of this. We want the wolf killed,” Patrick Perroud, a farmer and butcher from the nearby municipality of Oulens, told Keystone-ATS. “Cohabitation is not possible. Our territory is too small.”

The Swiss producers join a growing number of European farmers who over the last year have taken to the streets to protest. Politicians and bureaucrats in the European Union have taken farmers for granted, and have adopted policies and regulations that place their livelihoods and their ability to produce the continent’s foodstuffs in jeopardy.

We applaud the efforts of the Swiss producers, and the active protests by European farmers. It seems they have the attention of the ruling class.

Perhaps more direct, non-violent protests by U.S. farmers could do the same here.