On The Prowl

France is allowing wolf hunts in places where sheep are at risk from the carnivore's growing numbers, the BBC's John Laurenson reports. 

But efforts to cull wolves are controversial.

Late at night, up in an Alpine forest, a woman in a black skirt carrying a black gun gets out of her car.

Caroline Bourda (left) is a sheep farmer, in the hamlet of Esparron la Batie. Tonight, like most nights, she is trying to show the wolf who is top predator.

She fires. But up into the sky.

The government advises farmers to shoot near their farms to educate the wolves to stay away.

It has also advised - and paid for - sheep farmers to buy electric fences and huge protection dogs with spiked metal collars to stop the wolves sinking their fangs into their necks.

The French government is spending 12m euros (£10m) a year on wolf attack prevention and compensation.

In some areas the government pays out more for the wolf than it does for the unemployed, according to the hill farmers' organisation Eleveurs et Montagnes (Breeders and mountains).

Now France has allowed wolf hunts around threatened sheep farms like Caroline's and ordered a cull of 24 animals.

Hunters have so far managed to kill just seven, while the wolves - there are now more than 250 in France - are killing more sheep than ever.

Caroline says her last wolf attack was the previous weekend. She has lost dozens of ewes.

The wolf is a formidable adversary for man, she says: clever, determined and slightly unhinged.

"When they attack a flock - especially when they get inside an enclosure - they don't stop killing as long as there's still a sheep or a lamb moving," says Caroline.

They eat one and kill the others just for the sake of it, she says.