French farmers try to keep the wolves from their door

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The first streets of the town are less than 300 metres away. Just across the fields, there is a main road with two garages. In the distance, the slopes of champagne vineyards glitter in the evening sunshine. The scene is the epitome of sleepy rural France, the kind of place where – you would imagine – sheep may safely graze.

But here, a few days ago, on the edge of Bar-sur-Aube (population 5,000), just over two hours' drive east of Paris, a wolf, or wolves, attacked Jean-Baptiste Schreiner's sheep. One ewe was torn apart; 17 others were injured.

"Wolves here? In the mountains, or in the forests, maybe, but this is flatter country, farming country. No one expected ever to see wolves here again. Even people in the town are scared," Mr Schreiner, 41, told The Independent on Sunday.

Since May, there have been 22 confirmed wolf attacks in the so-called "little Champagne" region in the Aube and Haute-Marne, just south of Champagne proper. Mr Schreiner's sheep have been attacked three times.

Animal protection groups believe that a single animal – a lone wolf – has strayed from the Vosges mountains 200 miles to the east. Local farmers and hunters fear that at least two wolves are living in the dense local woodland, maybe even a family group or a small pack.

It is almost a century since wolves last lived in lowland France. Two decades ago, wolf packs began to push back over the Franco-Italian border in the mountains to the north of Nice. Since then, Canis lupus, the world's largest wild canine, has spread throughout the French Alps, across the busy Rhône valley into the Massif Central and up the eastern border of France to the Jura and Vosges mountains.

This year, for the first time, an unknown number of wolves has ventured into the rolling woodland and farmland of the sparsely populated plains of eastern France. Others are believed to have reached as far north as the French Ardennes, just south of the Belgian border
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