Dutch junior farm minister Jean Rummenie has described the European parliament’s decision to downgrade the wolf’s protected status as “very good news”.

MEPs voted on Thursday to change the status of the wolf from “strictly protected” to “protected”, making it easier to organise culls, and downgrade the wolf in domestic legislation.

“This will allow us to intervene when dealing with problem wolves,” Rummenie said on social media. “I have concept legislation ready to go and will open it to public consultation next week.”

The legislation includes measures to categorise the wolf as “lightly protected”, with definitions of what constitutes a problem wolf and problem situations, so that permits to kill them can be granted more quickly, Rummenie said.

Gelderland province this week gave the green light for hunters to kill a wolf that attacked a jogger, but animal rights groups have vowed to take legal action.

Around 100 wolves are now thought to have made the Netherlands their home, out of a European population of some 20,000.

Conservation groups have condemned the European parliament’s decision, describing it as “political move disguised as policy” which “ignores science, fuels division, and jeopardises one of Europe’s greatest conservation successes”.

The EU u-turn began in 2023 when commission president Ursula von der Leyen called for the downgrade following the death of her pony, Dolly, reportedly due to a wolf attack.

Then, that December, the European Commission proposed to downgrade the  species under the Bern Convention. Just a year earlier, the EU had rejected the same proposal for lacking a scientific basis.

Caroline van der Plas, the leader of Rummenie’s party BBB, has called for the Netherlands to become a wolf-free zone.

Dutch MPs have pointed out that in 95% of the attacks on livestock, farmers had not wolf-proofed the area where their flocks live.